Jeff Gordon's hours in the garage soon will be numbered. Credit: Autostock

Gordon's life, career to change with fatherhood

Four-time Cup champ can look to other drivers for inspiration

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- He might tear up a racecar, blow an engine, or get caught up in a crash. No matter the frustration Nextel Cup rookie David Reutimann might experience on the racetrack, it all begins to melt away when he gets back to his motorhome.

That's where his daughter, 4-year-old Emelia, is waiting.

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"What I've found is, no matter how your day goes at the racetrack, when you walk into the motorhome or you get home, they don't care," Reutimann said at Jackson Hewitt Preseason Thunder. "A lot of times after I've had a bad race, all you want to do is get back to the motorhome, because it's automatic. When you see her, it makes it a lot better."

On the Nextel Cup tour, children are as much of a presence as tires and fuel. At many racetracks, there's a playground in the middle of the lot where drivers and owners park their monstrous RVs. Although youngsters are rarely seen in the garage area, they regularly accompany their fathers across the stage during pre-race introductions.

Now, Cup's most successful active driver is on the brink of joining this world within a world. Four-time series champion Jeff Gordon announced last month that he and his wife, Ingrid Vandebosch, are expecting their first child in early July. Gordon's life -- and, almost certainly, his career as well -- are on the cusp of irreversible change.

"There's no doubt adjustments are going to be made with scheduling and things like that. Obviously, I'm keeping my schedule in June and July pretty open, to be prepared for the birth and the month after that to spend as much time as I can with Ingrid and the baby," Gordon said Wednesday at Daytona International Speedway.

"As far as being competitive on the racetrack, once I put the helmet on and flip that switch, there's nothing really that's on my mind that's going to change my competitiveness and wanting to win on the racetrack. I just think about the responsibilities and the sleepless nights and all those things. I'm just going to try to be like any other father, and see how it goes and try to do the best I can at my job."

Risks and rewards

But what about the 38-week event schedule? What about the risk involved in Gordon's choice of profession? What if Jeff Jr. -- if it's a boy -- wants to follow in daddy's footsteps and race cars?

All issues other NASCAR fathers have dealt with in their own way. In one area, though, there seems to be a consensus: You don't power through the draft at Talladega Superspeedway worrying about your kids.

	Ingrid Vandebosch and Jeff Gordon Credit: Paul Hawthorne/Getty Images
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"If I drive into Turn 3 at Darlington thinking about my children, perhaps I need to be somewhere else. There is a racecar driver, and then there's the person, and those people are genuinely different people. If Jeff Gordon conducts himself in the racecar the way he conducts himself in public, he wouldn't be very successful," said driver Jeff Burton, father of 11-year-old Harrison and 16-year-old Kimberle.

"You have to be arrogant, you have to be selfish, you have to be self-serving. You have to do everything your mother taught you not to do while driving a racecar, but you can't live your life like that. You can, but you're destined to die a lonely person. So I think that racecar drivers, as well as professional pilots or anybody who has a dangerous occupation, I don't think we carry with us the burden of being a father, or a husband or a sibling or a child. If you did, I just don't think you'd be successful."

Mark Martin, whose 15-year-old son Matt is a burgeoning racer in his own right, was more succinct: "The risk part, I don't think it has a huge impact, because none of us have a death wish or anything like that," he said. "So I don't think it has a huge impact, but [fatherhood] can affect you in different ways."

And many of those are positive, like when Reutimann's daughter first began to recognize daddy's Craftsman Truck on television.

"We'll be watching TV and a Truck race will come on, and she'll get excited and keep showing me that that's me on the TV. That's pretty special," said Reutimann, who ran the Truck circuit last year. "And I also see her at driver intros, when the cameras come up to her, how she reacts. Now she's at the point where she knows she gets to be on TV, too. It's a neat life being able to bring a kid into. At this point, she's just grown up around it. She considers it normal."

For Burton, it was seeing his kids' faces in Victory Lane.

"I'll tell you what, when I win a race, and my kids are in Victory Lane, the excitement that I see in them, the excitement they have for me, is irreplaceable," he said. "That makes you want to do it even more. It's a really precious thing when you have people who are excited for you because you accomplished your goal. That' a great thing. When you have children -- until they get to a certain age -- they're excited when something makes you happy. Then they turn evil."

"If I drive into Turn 3 at Darlington thinking about my children, perhaps I need to be somewhere else." - Jeff Burton

Driving factor

But the stresses exist amid those joys. There's the unrelenting schedule, the question of whether to bring the kid on the road, the time away from home. "It's difficult not to think, 'Am I being a good father?'" Reutimann said. To Martin, Matt's birth provided more motivation to excel.

"For me, I found it to be another driving factor," he said. "I didn't want to embarrass my son. I wanted to make my son proud. I wanted to set a great example and all those kind of things. As he got older, I wanted to spend more time with him, and have managed to become a little more stingy with my time and how I delegate it."

Not even Gordon is sure of the scope of the change he's about to experience. He says he's reading books and talking to other parents, that he wants to change diapers and be involved. He sees his fellow drivers who have children old enough to appreciate their fathers' racing careers, and hopes for the same thing.

If anything, Gordon, 35, seemed to imply Wednesday that fatherhood wouldn't lead him to retire sooner, but stay in the sport longer.

"A lot of fathers in this garage area are proud of what they've accomplished and where they're at. For their child to not really see that and be a part of that would be taking something away from them," Gordon said.

"I hope I can stay in this sport long enough and be competitive long enough for them to have an appreciation for what I've done all these years, to help provide the lifestyle they'll have. And maybe if they're interested in racing, it will come from that. Until that day comes, I don't know what to expect."