1,000 Greatest Drivers: Robby Gordon
That crackling sound you hear in the background is bridges being burned, I'm afraid...
The subtitle is a quote from Bob Varsha, which I think might be my favorite quote from a race broadcast of all time. Any NASCAR fan should be well aware of Gordon’s penchant to repeatedly burn bridges over and over: he hilariously drove for all four manufacturers in the seven years of his owner-driver stint. But he was doing this stuff in his CART career, too. After a breakout season in 1995, he limped to 18th in points, and he severed his connection to Ford and switched to Felix Sabates’s Chevy NASCAR team in 1997 because he felt the Ford engines were uncompetitive. He infamously kicked a Ford logo on his car on camera at Mid-Ohio (? I think), then at Road America intentionally grenaded his engine and called his car a “pig on the straights”. Gordon showed no respect to Ford, which had launched him as a star after he won four consecutive 24 Hours of Daytona class wins (making him one of only three drivers, alongside the much more obscure Amos Johnson and Peter Uria, to do that) and given him some marquee opportunities, including a part-time deal with Chip Ganassi only a few years before they blew out, getting to be A.J. Foyt’s firt full-time driver after his retirement, and even landing the #28 Robert Yates ride the next race Yates entered after Davey Allison’s death. From what I have read (although I haven’t confirmed it), Gordon was supposed to take over Bobby Rahal’s CART ride after Rahal’s retirement. I have also read that he, Jeff Gordon, and Tony Stewart were all offered the 1997 CAT ride for Team KOOL Green. While Jeff and Tony made the right choices because Jeff was dominating in NASCAR and Tony was dominating in the IRL with NASCAR ambitions, Robby probably made the wrong choice. His career was a career of wrong choices, making him one of the ultimate wasted talents.
Most people consider him overrated because of how often he shot himself in the foot and wasted his talent. I really don’t. I still made him a lock for this list because I am impressed with his racing crossovers. No, the reason I find him overrated is because I’m just not that impressed with his racing crossovers! Robby got a lot of hype in his heyday because he was one of the few American drivers who hearkened back to the ‘60s IndyCar stars who raced and won in anything like Mario Andretti, A.J. Foyt, Dan Gurney, and Parnelli Jones. (I hope nobody actually believes he’s even close to any of them.) You’d constantly see his fans belittling more dominant specialist drivers. I remember a lot of Robby fans acting like he was more talented than Jeff Gordon because he won in a bunch of different series, and Jeff didn’t. Do we know that? Do we actually know that Jeff couldn’t have done everything Robby did in every series he contested if he’d actually wanted to? Robby’s CART career is pretty good, and he certainly overachieved for A.J. Foyt and Derrick Walker, but do I think Jeff could’ve matched it? Yes, I do. Tony Stewart likewise and probably others. It’s worth noting that Robby actually has a negative rating in my open wheel model (and surprisingly his stock car rating is higher, even though he had a negative teammate record in his stock car starts and a positive record in his open wheel starts, because his open wheel teammates were generally very bad, while his most frequent Cup teammate Kevin Harvick is the highest-rated modern-era driver in my model). Robby’s fans also boasted that he was the only American driver to win a stage at the Dakar Rally. Who cares? How many Americans even seriously entered it. It’s not like he won it overall. When you see people like Shane van Gisbergen (who were WAY more dominant in their native discipline) crossing over and becoming WAY more dominant road racers even in NASCAR than Robby ever was, the idea that he’s as versatile as everybody made him out to be in his heyday starts to look pretty fallacious. He was just one of the few Americans making crossovers at a time not a lot of other people were making crossovers. Stewart’s was obviously better for starters, and Jimmie Johnson’s was too (considering he also came out of the same desert truck scene that Gordon did). Is Robby even close to them? No, he’s a lot more like John Andretti and A.J. Allmendinger. They all won in CART/Champ Car, NASCAR, and in sports cars but they weren’t really stars in any of those disciplines. I do think Robby is the best of the three (which is why he’s the only one of them I consider a lock), but the gap really isn’t that large. I don’t even think either Gordon’s CART or Cup careers alone would be enough to make the list. The combination definitely is, particularly when you also consider his greatness in sports cars, which is what impresses me most. I honestly like his 1990 season when he was 21 years old over anything he did since, because winning the SCORE title, five IMSA races, including both Daytona and Sebring, and his second consecutive wins in the Baja 1000 and Baja 500 genuinely impresses more than any of his humdrum IndyCar and NASCAR stuff.
tl;dr: Gordon is not overrated because he wasted his talent (even though he did). He is overrated because, quite honestly, for great race car drivers, successful crossovers aren’t that rare. They were just relatively rare in the US at that time, which made Gordon look better than he was. I will say, though, that even though I find his overall career massively overrated (because the best racing crossovers were almost always the European drivers all along, and there’s a certain American ethnocentrism that underlies a lot of the Gordon hype IMO), and I find his CART career overrated too, I find his NASCAR career a little underrated. I still think he was better in CART than NASCAR, but if NASCAR had had the percentage of road course races that CART did (or even the number NASCAR has now), he’d probably have been better there.
