Trophies and Scars: The Title Tells the Story

This story first appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Join the club to receive our award-winning magazine and enjoy insider access to automotive events, discounts, roadside assistance, and more.

On a Thursday, about 25 years ago, I flew from Detroit to Charlotte, North Carolina, and headed to Hendrick Motorsports in nearby Concord to pick up Ray Evernham, the gifted crew chief who led driver Jeff Gordon to 47 wins and three NASCAR Cup Series championships. We’d then drive down to Darlington Raceway in South Carolina, where I’d shadow Evernham and Gordon at the race that weekend for a story.

He was in a staff meeting when I arrived, in a room on the second floor of the race shop. I waited at the bottom of the stairs. Ten minutes later, the room began to empty. No one talked. At least two people coming down the stairs were in tears. Evidently Evernham runs an onerous meeting. He grabbed his gear and we headed for the parking lot. Evernham, still pissed off, drove my rental. The first 20 minutes were tense until he cooled down from the meeting.

Media access to Evernham, now 67, was rare. In his new autobiography, Trophies and Scars, he writes, “I chased more press people and reporters out of our garage than I can count… My theory was, if I acted like an asshole, the press would be afraid to bother me.”

It worked. And sometimes it bled over to his job. “There were days I was not a nice guy,” he writes. “Looking back, I regret being so stern and showing so little empathy. But my job was to win races.”

Early in his career, Evernham wanted to win from behind the wheel. Driving a ’68 Camaro, he won his first race at the local track in 1976, and by age 21, he had moved from street stocks to the tough modified class. At 25, he took a break from driving to turn wrenches for Roger Penske’s IROC series. In late 1990, when a teenage sprint car driver named Jeff Gordon ran the last few races of the season in what’s now the NASCAR Xfinity Series, Evernham was his crew chief. The rest was history. Except it wasn’t: With a rookie driver, a rookie crew chief, and an underfunded program, things did not go well. There was no money for 1991. Evernham went back to driving.

He was fast, and he was winning. Then, at a big race at his home track in Flemington, New Jersey, his modified was hit by another car, sending Evernham into the wall at 100 mph. He suffered a severe concussion, and though he made a heroic comeback, problems with his vision and depth perception lingered. After one last wreck, in the annual Flemington 200, he left the damaged car on the track, walked back to the pits, and told his crew, “Boys, I’ve had enough.”

Meanwhile, Gordon had returned to NASCAR, racing for Ford and owner Bill Davis, and they needed a chassis man. Gordon promptly began winning, thus drawing the attention of car dealer and team owner Rick Hendrick, who hired Gordon as a driver and Evernham as his crew chief. The duo would change NASCAR.

NASCAR changed Evernham.

Trophies and Scars does not hide from those scars, including the self-inflicted one after Evernham left wife Mary and son Ray J, who battled childhood leukemia, for sprint car racer Erin Crocker, 23 years his junior. Evernham and Crocker married and have a daughter, Cate. “In many ways, I think,” Evernham wrote, “I handled this situation better than some other things in my life that I’m not proud of.”

There’s also what he calls his “gut-wrenching” exit from his comfortable home at Hendrick Motorsports in 1999 after Dodge, looking to return to the NASCAR Cup Series, gave Evernham a nearly blank check to guide the program and start a new team. Evernham sold part of his Dodge team in 2007, the rest in 2009. He landed in television, as a NASCAR analyst and host of his own show, and he raced in the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb with a hot rod he built from scratch, and, with Crocker driving, the grueling Baja 1000.

Junior Johnson once told me that Evernham was the smartest crew chief in NASCAR. I saw evidence on that weekend with him at Darlington: Shortly before qualifying, I wandered inside the garage, where crew members were lying underneath Gordon’s rainbow-colored #24 Chevrolet. It was a chilly day, and the guys under the car were using handheld hair dryers to warm the grease at the wheels, because warm grease lubricates better and faster than cold, thick grease.

Ray Evernham, who could embrace the big picture and still sweat the details, earned his rightful place in the NASCAR Hall of Fame. The clear-eyed Trophies and Scars is aptly titled, and you don’t have to be a NASCAR fan to appreciate it.