There are few awards Jeff Gordon deems worthy of displaying inside his office as vice chairman of Hendrick Motorsports, and of his 93 NASCAR Cup series victories, a single race-winning trophy has made the cut.

It’s there Gordon proudly keeps the awards that tell the story of NASCAR’s third-winningest driver, one who single-handedly put Hendrick Motorsports on the map in the 1990s, broke through the noise and into mainstream media stardom during his illustrious career and earned ‘Honorary Hoosier’ status, despite growing up just outside San Francisco.

A Cup championship trophy. An award from the state of Indiana. The helmet he wore during the last of his 805 NASCAR Cup series starts. His team’s honorary ‘Papa Joe Hendrick Award of Excellence.’ A few charity honors, as well as recognitions from longtime partners Pepsi and Chevrolet. The steering wheel he used during his 2003 Formula 1 test on the IMS road course. GQ’s ‘Individual Athlete of the Year’ award from 2002.

In the middle of it all sits a rather understated trophy and another helmet – one with signatures from racing legends that include A.J. Foyt, Danny Sullivan, Dale Earnhardt and Darrell Waltrip – that represents winning the race he says “changed my life.”

The 1994 Brickyard 400 wasn't Gordon’s first at the top level of stock car racing, nor did it clinch a championship. But for the 23-year-old with the dark brown hair, boyish grin and rainbow-color fire suit who grew up dreaming of racing in the Indianapolis 500, capturing a victory in a race that would become one of NASCAR’s crown jewels – and doing so in its first edition, at that – helped launch one of the series’ most decorated modern-day careers and anoint one of its most popular and recognizable titans of the sport.

“The emotions at (my first career win in the 1994 Coke 600) were about a lot of accomplishment through a lot of hard work and feeling like I’d made it. (Winning) Indy was more of an accomplishment of a dream beyond belief and kinda, ‘Hey, I’ve not just made it. I’m taking things to the next level,’” Gordon told IndyStar last month in the lead-up to the 30th anniversary of his maiden Brickyard 400 victory. “This win was the launching pad for myself, my team and the whole sport, and I definitely felt that. I’ve said for many, many years that that day changed my life. I went from a kid trying to make it at the highest level of North American stock car racing, to not just making it, but ‘I’ve arrived.’”

Gordon's CART rejection births NASCAR stardom

When Gordon’s family moved from Vallejo, Calif. to Pittsboro, Ind. in the 1980s to support the racing prodigy’s boyhood dreams, a NASCAR career was hardly in the picture. Faced with age restrictions for sprint car racing in his home state, Gordon’s family parachuted into the racing hotbed of the Midwest, allowing him to pick up World of Outlaw feature victories as a teenager and race the same night of his high school graduation in the spring of 1989.

Later that year, he was named the USAC Midget Car Racing Rookie of the year. By 1991, Gordon had clinched the USAC National Midget title and the USAC Silver Crown Championship at 20 years old. A decade earlier, Gordon would’ve represented the stereotypical young oval racing ringer perfectly suited for CART, America’s premier open-wheel racing series – a championship that in 1981 held an 11-race calendar, just three of them road courses.

By 1991, however, the seas had completely shifted. Along with five oval events on the 17-race calendar, street racing in major metropolitan cities – Vancouver, Denver, Toronto, Detroit and Long Beach among them – had burst onto the scene and allowed the sport to take its product to jam-packed city centers. Similarly, historic, old-school road courses like Mid-Ohio, Road America and Laguna Seca helped make for a calendar that put an outsized importance on turning right as well as left.

The Indianapolis 500 still reigned supreme, but it was no longer the only reason to hand a prospect like Gordon a ride – and certainly not without bags full of cash to help fund it.

“My whole life, I’d thought, ‘I’m a sprint car or open-wheel racer, and this is going to lead to an open-wheel career racing at Indy.' I was probably naïve in thinking that because I didn’t realize what that meant beyond the Indianapolis Motor Speedway,” Gordon told IndyStar. “The rest of the season was about road racing – not racing ovals.

“I pursued it, but there were no opportunities. It was about bringing money, about being a better road racer and not just about Indianapolis, and really no one was looking for drivers like me at the time.”

Somewhere along the way, those close to him suggested Gordon tread down the stock car path.

“I went down to North Carolina and met with a couple people, and they were all over it. ‘How do we get you in the car?’ ‘Oh, you don’t have any money? Let’s figure it out and see if we can find you a sponsor or see if there’s a car owner that would want to hire you,’” Gordon said.

“And it happened.”

His name: Rick Hendrick.

“So at that point, my allegiance shifted dramatically. I was all-in on NASCAR,” Gordon said. “The places we go are filled with people. The purses are great. The money is good, and it seemed like all the momentum is with NASCAR, and the timing couldn’t have been more perfect.”

As Gordon quickly took to stock car racing, grabbing five top-5 finishes in the lower-level Busch series as a rookie in 1991 before capturing 11 poles and three victories in 1992, momentum around bringing the pinnacle of stock car racing to the Racing Capital of the World was steadily building. A.J. Foyt circulating the famed 2.5-mile oval in his Copenhagen Oldsmobile as part a commercial for Sears tools in September 1991 gave way to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway board of directors voting to pursue adding another major event to what for more than seven decades had been a single-race annual calendar. In 1992, IMS hosted a series of stock car tests – including two days in June with nine of NASCAR’s top teams.

Reports at the time estimated roughly 10,000 fans turned out. Gordon, then still a Busch series driver who would make his Cup debut later in the year with Hendrick Motorsports at Atlanta, was among the many who took notice.

“I was glued to the TV and wanting all the information I could get on how that went,” Gordon said. “I just remember not being there and being bummed out, but you knew it was coming.”

On April 14, 1993 IMS president and CEO Tony George, flanked by NASCAR president Bill France Jr., announced the birth of the Brickyard 400, a 160-lap race to be run by the world’s top stock car racing series on Aug. 6 the following year. Thinking back, Gordon says now he doesn’t remember if the eventual ‘crown jewel’ event was promised more than a single year at its outset, but success or fail, the Hendrick’s newly-minted NASCAR rookie remembers the incomparable craze the prospect of the race delivered both the paddock and its fanbase.

“I thought it could be one-and-done, but it didn’t matter. I was going to be the inaugural one, and everybody wanted to win that one,” he said. “And when it was announced, I don’t think [Hendrick Motorsports] was thinking, ‘We’re going to win that race.’ I don’t think it was until early 1994, when we started performing on a more consistent basis – and then winning in May – that we all thought that those efforts we were putting in to try and bring our best effort to IMS, that it might not be just to go finish in the top-5.

“It was to win.”

An Indy 500 atmosphere in August

Just a couple weeks under 12 months until that inaugural Brickyard 400, the NASCAR Cup rookie who had grown up attending Indy 500s, took the IMS Museum bus tour to better understand the hollowed grounds and would one day be invited to races as the guest of Foyt, Carl Haas and Paul Newman, took to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the first time.

At 52 years old, with more than 30 years spent in the sport and 93 wins – five of them Brickyard 400s – the details of his IMS debut are a bit foggy. Gordon has to be reminded that he nearly topped the charts during that two-day test in August 1993 – third-fastest with a lap of just a tick under 166 mph, trailing only Bill Eliott and Mark Martin. At the time, though, speed wasn’t the story. It was the ever-growing aura around an event that still had a year’s worth of momentum to build.

“The entire garage area recognized that this was historical," Gordon said. "Everybody respected Indianapolis and what it meant to motorsports and the history of motorsports and what that one event was going to mean to the history of NASCAR and each driver’s career."

Even for that two-day open-test, Gordon remembers, fans were three-deep hugging the fence line around the garages. At the time, the Daytona 500 – NASCAR’s Super Bowl-like season-kickoff – frequently hosted crowds that touched 150,000. As Gordon recalls, even your more run-of-the-mill events across the calendar could draw 80,000 or even 100,000.

Those two test days were race-day-level crowds. “It was nuts,” he said, “absolutely nuts.”

Nearly as nuts was the entry list. At a time where sending hordes of drivers home from high-profile races was the norm, the inaugural Brickyard 400 took things to the next level. That year’s Indy 500 attracted more than 50 drivers to try and fill the 11 rows of 3, and the Daytona 500 pulled nearly 70 for its 42-car field.

Nearly 90 drivers showed up with hopes of being part of history.

The legendary field featured a Brabham, a Foyt, an Andretti, a Petty and an Earnhardt.

Gordon says the race day atmosphere was befitting of the talent and history in the making. Some diehard, lifelong, generational 500 fans may call this heresy, but there just isn’t anything else that could come close in comparison. With crowd estimates of 250,000 or more – 100,000 or more larger than that year’s Daytona 500 -- Gordon, the adopted Hoosier, remembers it feeling every bit of a 500 race day. The crowd. The endless wall of color in the stands as drivers turned their pace laps. The fanatics hanging on the fences, begging for an autograph or a photo.

“I just didn’t think it could be as big as the Indy 500, and yet, that day and that weekend, it was in my opinion,” Gordon said. “It didn’t have the Snake Pit, but other than that, you had people just clamoring to get a view of the cars and access to the drivers.

“A lot of places we were going at the time had big crowds, but nothing was as big as what that day was like at Indy. Everywhere we were going at the time looked and felt full, so that had been exciting to me, but I’d never been in any racing series of any kind that had that kind of attendance other than the Indy 500, so when we went to Indy, and you know the capacity they have, you can’t imagine they’re going to fill it up for anything other than the Indy 500. But they did.”

'There was no doubt who they were pulling for'

There’s perhaps no better way to describe what the prospect of winning the Brickyard meant to the driver contingency than this: Earnhardt, who at the time was in the midst of winning his record-tying seventh Cup championship and who’d won a trio of Southern 500s and Coke 600s, seemingly tried to win the race in Lap 1 of 160.

Starting on the front row on the outside of polesitter Rick Mast, The Intimidator drifted high while attempting to make a pass on Mast during those first 2.5 miles. The damage his car suffered, as innocent of contact as it may have seemed, weighed Earnhardt’s machine down like a parachute all day. He’d rarely factored into the conversation, though he managed 5^th.

Gordon would first take the lead on Lap 3 and spent more than 20 laps there, leading again from Lap 48 to 70 and 73-80 as the race hit its halfway point. A battle for the lead between the feuding Bodine brothers, Geoff and Brett, eventually led to contact that would take out the former, as well as Dale Jarrett, on Lap 100 as the contender field began to shrink.

Along with Gordon lurked then-12-time race-winner Ernie Irvan, who’d started 17^th but meticulously clawed his way through the field to take the lead for the first time with 20 laps to go. He passed Gordon after the No. 24 DuPont Chevy driver had overtaken legend of the sport Rusty Wallace just a few laps prior during the final restart. Gordon and Irvan would run nose-to-tail, pulling away from Bodine, Bill Elliott, Wallace and Earnhardt.

After trading the lead with under 15 laps to go, Gordon was seemingly comfortable tucking in and waiting for a closing-laps move, but on Lap 156, Irvan drifted high in Turn 1 after running over a small piece of debris on the front stretch. Dipping underneath the No. 28 in the south short chute, Gordon orchestrated the 21^st and final lead change of the day seamlessly, moments before Irvan’s right-front tire blew on the backstretch. Though Bodine would make a valiant effort to close the gap on Gordon over the final four laps, Rick Hendrick’s second-year prodigy wouldn’t be seriously challenged the rest of the way, taking the checkered flag by 0.53 seconds for his second-career win.

Over the rumble of the engines during his cooldown lap, Gordon heard a roar unlike he’d ever experienced in his career – one that helped bring a surprising pre-race observation full-circle.

“In driver intros, I was a little caught by surprise at the amount of people that were cheering for me. I was used to going everywhere, and Earnhardt got the loudest applause,” Gordon said. “I don’t remember if he did that day, but I remember mine was really strong.

“And when that day ended, there was no doubt who they were pulling for.”

Around the track, video boards soon lit up with a special message that, in a way, was the final touch to prove to Gordon he’d ‘made it’ in Indiana racing lore, no matter what his birth certificate read.

‘Congratulations to Indiana’s own Jeff Gordon.’

'I got to race there, and I got to win there'

Gordon’s NASCAR Cup career would last more than two decades longer. That next year, spurred by already having how two of NASCAR’s four ‘crown jewel’ events, the young hotshot with Indiana roots would take four of the first seven poles of the season and win seven times to capture his first of four Cup titles. From 1995-98, Gordon would capture 40 wins, three titles, his first of three Daytona 500 victories and his second of a record five at the Brickyard.

To this day, he credits all the spoils of his career to that August day in Speedway, Ind. Having gone through this year’s 500 with Hendrick’s latest superstar in the making, 2021 Cup champ Kyle Larson, Gordon still carries some small regrets of a career that took a turn in his early 20s that he was never able to reroute back to May at IMS as a driver.

“But in many ways, it was even better than the dream I had for racing at Indianapolis,” he said. “I’m bummed that I didn’t get a chance to race in (the Indy 500), but at the same time, my career was completely fulfilled in so many other ways. It couldn’t have been more perfect.

“You go to Indianapolis, and not only did I realize I belonged in NASCAR and I’m an oval-track racer, and I see all the opportunities that are here in this sport that’s thriving, but we get this massive crowd at Indy that changed the history there and changed the trajectory of NASCAR.”

Now 30 years later, as the Cup series returns to the famed oval for the first time in four years – a drought that, for some, feels like forever – Gordon is reminded that no matter how much fanfare greets the lucky driver who wins this special 30^th-anniversary race that in many ways feels like a homecoming for NASCAR, no one except he and Ray Harroun can ever be credited as the firsts.

Gordon bristles at the mention.

“I’m a realist. Nothing compares to anything anyone’s done at the Indy 500. Not their four-time winners vs. me as a five-time Brickyard 400 winner. Not the inaugural 500 winner vs. the inaugural 400 winner,” he said. “I have the utmost respect for what the history is of the Indy 500, and that’s not necessarily held true for the Brickyard 400.

“We had to move off the oval because it didn’t hold its popularity for whatever reason. But I’m excited we’re back, and what matters to me is that I got to go race there, and I got to win there.”

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Jeff Gordon on winning the first Brickyard 400