Hendrick Motorsports icon Jeff Gordon won his third Cup Series championship in 1998. NASCAR remembers his run that year as one of the most dominant performances by a driver for he won a staggering 13 races through the season. What makes this number even more impressive is the fact that there were four consecutive victories in it.
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Gordon’s summer that rocked the world began after a DNF in Richmond. He posted top-5 finishes in 17 consecutive races following it. He trailed in points when the field traveled to the Sonoma Raceway in June but in a few weeks, the title became his to lose. He won at Sears Point and then went on to win four consecutive races from late July to mid-August.
On this date [July 26] in 1998: Jeff Gordon led 164 of 200 laps to win @PoconoRaceway. First of 4 consecutive wins — Pocono, @IMS, @WGI, @MISpeedway. In the last 30 years, Gordon is just one of 2 drivers (also @JimmieJohnson in 2007) to win 4 straight #NASCAR Cup races. pic.twitter.com/qzMRYAbj5d
— Jeff Gordon Online (@JGinfo) July 26, 2024
The victories came at Pocono, Indianapolis, Watkins Glen, and Michigan. Notably, the Brickyard 400 win added $1 million to his wallet. The winning stretch hit a slight hurdle in Bristol where he finished fifth but continued in New Hampshire and Darlington, extending it to wins in six out of seven races. Another remarkable part of the season is that he won 10 of the last 18 races.
These weren’t victories in run-of-the-mill events. He won the Coca-Cola 600, the Southern 500, and the Brickyard 400 in 1998. He ended the year by winning three of the four final races. Gordon himself tells the NASCAR Hall of Fame, “From about race 14 to the final race of the year of that ’98 season, any time I look at those stats, I go, ‘Wow, that right there was impressive.”
Jimmie Johnson, the only driver to match Gordon’s feat in the last 30 years
Gordon and his former teammate Jimmie Johnson are the only two drivers to have four consecutive victories in the Cup Series in the last 30 years. Johnson’s streak came in 2007, the year in which he won his second championship. The run began at Martinsville and continued in Atlanta and Texas before concluding at Phoenix, in the season’s penultimate race.
He won the championship at Homestead-Miami on the final day of the season. The seven-time Cup Series title-holder won 10 races that year and still fell short of Gordon’s numbers. No driver since has come close to repeating the feat that these two Hendrick Motorsports icons achieved. That’s partly attributable to NASCAR’s efforts to bring parity across the field and create more competitiveness.
