Jordan Taylor is an elite (and introverted) sports car driver. Rodney Sandstorm is a wildly brash NASCAR fan. And they’re the same guy.
Jordan Taylor has been around racing all his life. He’s driven on plenty of famous tracks and rubbed shoulders with plenty of famous drivers, but he was still surprised to see just how fanatical the sport’s followers can be.
It was not long before the 2017 running of the 24 Hours of Daytona, and he was in Brownsburg, Ind., having lunch at a small restaurant with Jeff Gordon. They were going to be teammates in the race, and they were on their way to get the four-time NASCAR champ some time in a simulator. “He was getting approached by fans left and right at just a normal restaurant, not even in a race town,” says Taylor. “I couldn’t believe how famous he was.”
For the record, Gordon remembers it as being “just another day,” which makes one wonder how Taylor would have reacted had the lunch been in, say, Charlotte. But nonetheless, a little light went off over Taylor’s head. He went on eBay and bought a vintage DuPont rainbow Gordon jacket. (“It’s authentic,” Taylor says. “It still smells like cigarettes.”) He got a pair of jeans and cut them into shorts. Some oversized shades, a crooked cap and a pair of Dr. Scholl’s shoes (“super comfortable”) completed the outfit. Then, when he got to Daytona, he approached Gordon in the paddock and tried to pass himself off as a rabid fan. “Unfortunately he caught on like five seconds into the prank,” says Taylor. “But people loved the outfit, the jorts and the name [I’d come up with]: Rodney Sandstorm. So it kind of took on a life of its own after that.”
Jeffery A. Salter/Sports Illustrated
Five years later, Rodney is still going strong. He’s turned up all over the racing landscape, he has nearly 20,000 Instagram followers and he had Fox announcer Darrell Waltrip ready to call security when he crashed a live segment on pit road in Talladega, asking Gordon to autograph his shoe. Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s media company, Dirty Mo Media, recently hired him to contribute to a series called Video Jorts. “What blows me away is how many places I see him,” says Gordon. “I tap into social media and see where he is at and I’m going, Oh my God, he’s still pulling this off? I’m certainly not surprised that we did it at an IMSA race that I was participating in, or maybe at a NASCAR race. But when I see him at an F1 event”—Rodney was very popular in Miami this spring—“I just always get a big laugh.”
So, yeah, things are pretty good for Rodney Sandstorm. So good that he’s almost as famous as Taylor himself—which is saying something, because Taylor is one of the best sports car drivers in the world. He and Gordon won that 24 Hours of Daytona, alongside Jordan’s older brother, Ricky, and teammate Max Angelelli. Gordon, a four-time NASCAR champ, was the most inexperienced member of that team, and he drew heavily on Jordan for advice. “I learned a ton from him,” Gordon says. “He was a great resource for me, whether it was a shift point, a braking point or a line on the racetrack.” Jordan has also won his class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2015, and he’s also won the 12 Hours of Sebring and has four IMSA drivers championships.
Jordan and Ricky got their start watching their father, Wayne, a two-time 24 Hours of Daytona winner. “My brother and I didn’t have any kind of aspirations to drive or race [as kids],” says Jordan. “It was just, you know, what Dad did.” As the brothers got a little older, they’d start sitting in on debriefings, picking up pointers from drivers and engineers. Wayne briefly retired from driving when Jordan was nine and bought the boys a go-kart. They would take turns racing it, alternating weekends.
Getting more seat time certainly helped Jordan get better, as did having a racer for a father. But what really changed his fortunes was a trip to the eye doctor. “I didn’t know I needed glasses, so it would take me about four hours to get up to speed and see where I was going,” he says.
Jeffery A. Salter/Sports Illustrated
Now able to navigate, a bespectacled Jordan and his brother made the jump from karts to cars. Wayne had started his own team, but both Taylor boys wanted to strike out on their own to avoid the appearance of nepotism. In 2011, when Jordan was 20, he finished second in the Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car Series GT Championship and caught the eye of Corvette Racing, which brought him on as a third driver for endurance races.
By 2014, he had sufficiently built up his reputation, so he joined his dad’s IMSA team full-time—as did Ricky. Just as Jordan’s racing career was blowing up, so was social media. He has always been quiet, like his brother—“We didn’t have many friends [growing up],” Jordan says. “I was super shy and introverted when I was young. So for me, social media was an easy outlet where I wasn’t having to do things face-to-face with people. But I could put it out there and kind of show who I was.”
So Taylor did what any shy dude with a cellphone would: He let his hair down—at least in the back—and started crafting funny posts. “I grew a mullet, and it was—this is kind of a weird analogy—almost like the Batman cape,” he says. “Once I had the mullet, l lost a lot of self-awareness and I wasn’t worried about what people thought of me.”
That led to the birth of Rodney Sandstorm, who has a different backstory than the Gordon fanatic who now uses the name. “He was a competitive palm tree climber and he once slid all the way down one, and the palm tree ripped up the insides of his legs,” Taylor says, laughing. “So they did plastic surgery on his thighs, and then he became an underwear model.”
Another photo series on Facebook and Instagram captured Taylor leaning up against a sweet vintage sports car, describing his ideal first date. All of them began, “I pick you up in my 1965 Corvette Stingray . . .” before veering into absurdities involving hairless foxes or drug cartels.
The Vette can be something of a headache. A few years ago, the family of a young fan named Nicholas got in touch with Taylor to tell him they were going to Disney World. Taylor, who lives outside Orlando, offered to take Nicholas bowling or minigolfing. He picked Nicholas up in the Corvette, which promptly broke down on the interstate. After five or six hours of waiting for a tow truck, they went back to Taylor’s house, jumped in his truck and returned to Disney. “He didn’t get much of an experience,” Taylor says, laughing.
It may seem surprising that someone self-admittedly shy is comfortable and generous with fans, but that’s just how Taylor is. (And the admiration runs both ways. Anthony Brown won a 2020 COVID-19 fundraiser, the All-In Challenge, for the right to have a photo shoot with any athlete; he chose Taylor, and their picture was on the cover SI’s August 2022 issue.)
After Taylor appeared on the Dale Jr. Download, the podcast Earnhardt hosts with Mike Davis, Taylor was asked by Davis to make an appearance in a Dirty Mo Media suite at the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Taylor mingled, participated in a Q&A and asked the assembled fans whether they wanted to hear a good pee story.
Said story involved the age-old question faced by racers—and astronauts—about what happens when they have to use the facilities. “Anybody else [tells that story] and they get the awkward looks—and then, you know, maybe have to talk to the cops,” says Davis, the managing director of the Dale Earnhardt Jr. brand and the founder of Dirty Mo. “But Jordan is just quirky, and he’s unique.”
Davis then asked Taylor to start creating content. In Video Jorts, which Taylor writes and produces, he inserts footage he shoots of himself into clips of the Download podcast. Davis can always tell when a new Jort has been posted: “I’ll hear people in their offices down the hall just laughing,” he says. “That’s the only piece of content we produce—and we produce a lot of content—where I can hear hysteria, almost chaotic, outta-control laughing.”
If Taylor ever made the move to NASCAR, he’d be the breath of fresh, offbeat air that the circuit needs. But he has no designs on that. He and Ricky left their dad’s team following the 2017 season, having accomplished everything they could. “We won all the major endurance races together; we won the championship together as a family,” says Jordan. “We checked all the boxes together. I was O.K. to part ways at that point.”
Jordan signed with Corvette, for whom he’s won the last two IMSA driving titles. He concedes that he wouldn’t mind running a NASCAR road race or two—and Gordon says, “There’s no doubt he has the skills.” But for now Taylor likes turning right, and his situation is too good to leave. He calls it “a dream come true, being able to come to places like Le Mans and Daytona and Sebring and make a name for myself.”
Actually two names. Let’s not forget about Rodney.
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