About more than one last rce.
So he knew Sunday was probably going to be the same. Still, he arrived with gifts for his fellow drivers, each one receiving an expensive, Italian-made ring box as a memento. That's Gordon, looking to thank them.
Instead it was everyone else thanking him – in part for representing the sport so well, in mentoring so many for so long, in racing the right way and, of course, in causing sponsorship dollars and prize money to spike exponentially.
It wasn't just the handshakes and hugs, though. He may have expected that. It was the tweets about him. It was the testimonials in feature articles that his mom told him about. It was Kevin Harvick, the defending champ and one of the other three drivers with a shot at the championship, posing pre-race with Gordon's car. It was Danica Patrick wearing a Gordon hat. It was others wearing his T-shirt.
"That's just unheard of," Gordon marveled. "You know, drivers are so competitive. They don't show – they might have it inside them, but to show it publicly?"
Gordon knew some moments were coming. He knew that final pre-race walk down pit road, hand-in-hand with daughter Ella, the crowd roaring across the way, was going to be something else. He knew that final national anthem, with wife Ingrid and son Leo at his side, too, was going to pull at his heart. He knew a hug from his car owner, Rick Hendrick, was going to push him to the limits.
"I'm an emotional guy," Gordon said.
He suspected there would be surprises and there were. Familiar faces he didn't expect, old co-workers racing over for a moment, just regular fans. Lewis Hamilton, the current Formula One great, arrived for his first NASCAR race ever, even peering into Gordon's ride and checking out the set-up, because that's how much Gordon meant to racing in general.
Mario Andretti came and gave him a pep talk – "Go do what you know how to do, you've got this, man," Gordon relayed. Suddenly Gordon was back to being an awe-struck kid.
Mario Andretti?
"The greatest driver of all time," Gordon marveled.
He tried to follow Andretti's advice, giving it his all in a heated race. He led for a few laps early, but he didn't have the car to finish it out, not enough control, not enough speed. "Nothing terrible," he said at one point over his radio, "I'm just really struggling."
He was mostly stuck in 10th. He finished sixth, no threat to Kyle Busch, who was the better driver in the better car on this day. Gordon was disappointed with the loss but he knew this day was about more than one last race, one more championship.
"It blows my mind," he said. "It didn't take the championship for me to come out of here feeling like I'm on top of the world. The competitor in me still is cutting into that slightly right now. … Give me an hour and a little bit of alcohol, there's going to be so much love in the air."
What's Jeff Gordon drink at a time like this?
"Tonight?" he joked. "A lot of things."