How the Great Jeff Gordon Became NASCAR's Iron Man

• In a 23-plus-year run from the final race of 1992 (his NASCAR Cup debut) until the last event of 2015, Gordon started 797 Cup races in a row

• Gordon took the lead in the record for consecutive races category when he took the green flag at Loudon, New Hampshire, on Sept. 27, 2015.

• Gordon's impact on the sport goes beyond one record. One would need a thesaurus to truly describe him.

If you ever tried to describe Jeffrey Michael Gordon’s impact in the world of NASCAR, you’d best have a very large thesaurus handy, for the Vallejo, Calif. native would likely have several dozen words of superlatives to best describe him.

And you likely wouldn’t use the same word twice.

But perhaps the best descriptor of Gordon was his toughness both as a competitor and his ability to race regardless of circumstances—even injuries didn’t sideline him.

In a 23-year run from the final race of 1992 (his Cup debut) until the last event of 2015, Gordon started 797 Cup races in a row, breaking Ricky Rudd’s prior “Iron Man” record of 788 consecutive Cup Series race starts. Gordon took the lead in the category when he took the green flag at Loudon, New Hampshire, on Sept. 27, 2015.

After retiring at the end of the 2015 season, Gordon returned in the second half of the 2016 season to replace the injured Dale Earnhardt Jr., who missed the final 18 events of the year due to a severe concussion. Gordon would drive in eight of those 18 events Earnhardt missed.

Gordon would go on to become an outstanding member of the Fox Sports NASCAR telecasts until June 23, 2021, when his former boss and business partner, Rick Hendrick, named Gordon as Vice Chairman of Team Hendrick—basically the No. 2 man in the Hendrick Motorsports depth chart, and the expected heir to the leadership throne of HMS once Rick Hendrick decides to retire.

Here are some of Gordon’s most notable achievements:

• Won 93 races, third on NASCAR’s all-time wins list, behind Richard Petty’s 200 wins and David Pearson’s 105 wins. He also earned 325 top-5 and 477 top-10 finishes in 805 career starts.

• Won four NASCAR Cup championships (1995—the youngest Cup champ in history at 24 years old, 1997, 1998 and 2001, the same season that Dale Earnhardt was killed in the season-opening Daytona 500).

• Speaking of Earnhardt, he and Gordon had one of NASCAR’s most storied and celebrated rivalries during their careers, from 1993 through 2000. While the pair gave the impression they hated each other to the media, the truth actually is Gordon and Earnhardt were great friends and great competitors, and also close business partners that had the duo laughing all the way to the bank while everyone else lamented how much they hated each other – which they obviously didn’t.

• Had it not been for the playoff system implemented in 2004, Gordon potentially would have won at least two more championships. Even so, he would earn two runner-up (1996 and 2007) and three other top-3 finishes (2004, 2009 and 2015, his last full season in Cup) in his career.

• He won the Daytona 500 three times (1997, 1999 and 2005).

• Much of his career success was tied to the partnership he had with crew chief Ray Evernham, who directed Gordon to three of his four Cup titles and 49 of his eventual 93 wins, backed with an outstanding pit crew famously known as the “Rainbow Warriors”.

• Gordon’s family moved from California to Pittsboro, Indiana, when he was 10 years old (1881) so he could further develop his skills driving sprint and midget cars in the Midwest. It was always expected Gordonwould eventually race in the IndyCar Series, but a lack of funding ended that dream before Bill Davis came calling and hired him to drive his then-Busch Series car in 1991 and 1992, earning three wins, 15 top-5s, 25 top-10s and 12 poles.

• Gordon was inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2019.

• Even though he didn’t really factor in the overall storyline, finishing 31st after crashing halfway through the 1992 season-ending race at Atlanta Motor Speedway, Gordon was still involved in one of the most memorable races in NASCAR history as Alan Kulwicki rallied to win the championship in an extremely close last-race battle with Bill Elliott by a mere 10 points, and what was also the final Cup race of his career for seven-time Cup champion Richard Petty.

• Was credited for “discovering” eventual seven-time Cup champ Jimmie Johnson and bringing him to Rick Hendrick’s attention. Gordon believed in Johnson so much that he became co-owners of Johnson’s No. 48 team with Hendrick.

• With his 797 consecutive starts, Gordon was NASCAR’s Iron Man, comparable to Cal Ripken Jr., who holds the Major League Baseball record of 2,632 consecutive starts.

• Gordon's impact on the sport goes beyond one record. One would need a thesaurus to truly describe Gordon. While we could come up with several dozen, here’s a quick baker’s dozen to describe the man many simply know and refer to as “Jeff”:

Awesome, outstanding, excellent, tremendous, remarkable, amazing, astounding, terrific, wonderful, stupendous, dazzling, marvelous and, perhaps the best word of all, namely GREAT.

Follow Autoweek contributor Jerry Bonkowski on Twitter @JerryBonkowski