A Veteran Champion at Only 24 : Auto racing: Gordon’s visage belies his 19 years of driving cars fast--and winning.

Don’t let that mischievous little-boy grin and the date on Jeff Gordon’s driver’s license mislead you.

Stock car racing’s Wonder Boy may have only 24 candles on his birthday cake Friday--matching the number on his rainbow-colored Chevrolet Monte Carlo--but in years of experience, he matches up well with the 40-year-old drivers who dominate Winston Cup racing.

“This is Jeff’s 19th year in a race car,” said John Bickford, Gordon’s stepfather and the mastermind behind a racing career that began in Vallejo, Calif., when Jeff was 5. Bickford built Gordon his first quarter-midget and took him racing on Northern California tracks.

Now Gordon is the NASCAR Winston Cup point leader with five victories and seven poles, the leading money winner with $1.6 million and the overwhelming leader in laps led going into Saturday’s Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where he will be the defending champion.

By contrast, seven-time NASCAR champion Dale Earnhardt was 29 before he won his first title; Richard Petty was 26.

Petty’s last Winston Cup race was Gordon’s first.

“Winning the championship wasn’t really one of our goals when we started out last February in Daytona,” Gordon said. “Our main goal was to win five races and be as competitive as we could. Now we’ve won five, so we had to reset our goals.

“Right now, our goal is to win again on Saturday, then win the next race and the next. Our goals are short-term, and if we’re still there [leading in points] when we get to Atlanta [for the final race], we’ll definitely be looking at the million-dollar bonus.”

Winning championships has been a constant on Gordon’s racing resume. In the summer of 1979, when he was barely 8, Gordon won his first national quarter-midget championship in Denver. Two years later, he won another.

“Summers we’d load up the truck, and my stepdad and my mom and I would drive around the country looking for races,” he said. “When I was 13, nearly 14, my stepdad had a sprint car built for me. But we couldn’t race it in California, so we went to Florida, where you didn’t need a driver’s license to race.”

By the time he was old enough to compete in California, he had won more than 100 open-wheel races, often driving two or three nights a week.

After his freshman year at Vallejo High, Gordon’s family moved to Pittsboro, Ind., for a more racing-oriented environment. He was only about 20 miles from the home of Indy car racing, which was his dream while growing up.

The dream seemed realistic when he won the United States Auto Club’s midget championship at 19 and the USAC Silver Crown title for oversized sprint cars the next year. But when no one in Indy car racing seemed interested in someone so youthful-looking--he tried to grow a mustache to look older--Gordon turned to stock cars.

His biggest break may have been connecting with Ray Evernham, his crew chief since their first race in a Busch Grand National car in 1991. In that event, Gordon put Hugh Connerly’s Ford on the front row.

After winning a record 11 poles and three races in a Ford for Bill Davis in 1992, Gordon left the Busch series and Ford to join Rick Hendrick’s three-car Chevrolet team in the Winston Cup series.

“It was a lucky day for me when I learned that Jeff wasn’t under contract to Ford,” Hendrick said. “I had watched him racing against Earnhardt in a Busch race, and I couldn’t believe how he kept right with Dale and never gave an inch. He was absolutely fearless, and he was driving against the best in the business.”

When Gordon switched, so did Evernham, a veteran of International Race of Champions car preparation before becoming a crew chief. At 37, he is the elder statesman of the DuPont Rainbow Warriors, as Gordon’s crew is known.

“Working with IROC drivers,” Evernham said, “I’ve been around most of the great ones--Mario and Michael [Andretti], the Unsers, Earnhardt, guys like that--and I’ve noticed they all have that same winning mind-set. It’s just an attitude, and Jeff’s the same way. I don’t think it’s something that can be learned. It’s just there, and he has it.”

Not that he’s immune to failure, but he learns quickly.

At Pocono, Pa., in June, Gordon was leading with seven laps remaining in the UAW-GM 500. He missed a shift on a restart and ended up 16th after having led 124 of 200 laps.

“It was the worst feeling in the world,” Gordon said. “I drove around for five or six laps, and it was just total frustration. We had that win right under our belts and I screwed it up, but like everybody says, that’s part of racing. It’s part of your experience. I just don’t want it to happen again.”

A similar circumstance occurred a month later during the Pepsi 400 at Daytona Beach, Fla., where Gordon was in front again for a restart with one lap remaining and Earnhardt and Daytona 500 winner Sterling Marlin on his bumper.

“The last guy in the world you want to see in your mirror with one lap to go is Earnhardt,” Gordon said. “And most times, the worst place to be on a restart is in front because the guys in back gang up on you and push each other to the front.”

Gordon is innovative, however, and he showed it to the 120,000 screaming fans at Daytona.

Instead of speeding up behind the pace car in hopes of mashing the throttle and holding off Earnhardt and Marlin, Gordon slowed to a crawl, causing his pursuers to lose their momentum in the draft--and the race.

“It was pure genius on Jeff’s part,” Evernham said. “It wasn’t the kind of move you can plan. It was just something he engineered at the moment.”

Not everything works out so well when you’re going 200 m.p.h. around a race track. Nearly two weeks have passed, but Gordon is still upset over the incident that sent Kenny Schrader, his Hendrick teammate, cartwheeling down the track at Talladega, Ala., in the Die Hard 500.

“Looking back, it was really weird how it happened,” Gordon said. “My tires were worn and I didn’t want to get up beside Kenny, so I fell into line behind him. I had quite a bit of momentum, but I was holding my position when Rickey Craven came up behind me with a lot of his own momentum. That gave me more than I could handle.

“I had to make a quick choice, either bump into the rear of Kenny’s car or dive down low and get out of the draft. I decided to go to the bottom, but as I came off the second turn, my car started working its way back up the track.

“All of a sudden, bang, my front fender touched Kenny’s enough to turn him around. I went on through, but when I looked in my mirror and saw Kenny’s car get airborne and start tumbling, it was very scary for me. Whether that affected me or not, I was never able to keep my foot on the gas the rest of the day.”

Schrader survived one of the most frightening accidents in Talladega’s long history, and a few days later, he was back driving in a SuperTruck race.

“I’ve never met anybody like that Schrader,” Gordon said. “Most guys you put in the wall are waiting to punch you out, but before the race was over, he was on my radio assuring me that he wasn’t upset with me. Obviously, inside, you know he was. As soon as I got home, I called to assure him I was concerned for him.

“It was a mistake on my part, and I hope it never happens again.”

There were no mistakes last year in the Brickyard 400, when Gordon battled Ernie Irvan down the stretch until Irvan blew a tire five laps from the finish. The youngster from nearby Pittsboro made Hoosier racing fans delirious when he took the checkered flag in the first stock car race at the Speedway.

“I know it’s easy to say now, but I had a feeling, a premonition, that I was going to win last year,” Gordon said.

“In fact, things were going so good after qualifying and our last practice, and even during the race, I started getting more and more nervous. It got very intense at the end. I thought I had it when Ernie [Irvan] had that cut tire, but then Brett Bodine came out of nowhere and I had a fight on my hands again. But I never lost that feeling I would win.”

And does he have that feeling this year?

“I hope I’ll have it, but who knows?” he said. “It’s not something I ever felt before. We’ll have to see how I feel after [today’s] qualifying.

“Racing is so funny. Some days you think you should win, and you don’t. Other days it’s just the opposite. You win when you don’t think you had a chance. That’s what makes last year so special. I really thought I was going to win, and I did.

“Maybe it’s because I dreamed of racing at Indy all the time I was growing up. I quit thinking about it when I decided to run stock cars until NASCAR and [Speedway President] Tony George announced the race here. I kept thinking about Ray Harroun winning the first 500 in 1911 and how everyone remembers his name.

“I don’t know how I’ll come out Saturday, but whatever happens, I’ll always be the driver who dreamed about winning the first Brickyard race and then did it.”

Two days after his 23rd birthday. Ray Harroun was 32.