"Home" is a bit of a moving target these days. He and Ingrid recently bought an apartment on the Upper West Side, and Gordon — who has hosted "Saturday Night Live" and Regis and Kelly — has in essence relocated his private life from Boca Raton, Fla., to Manhattan since his divorce in 2003. The most obvious reason is that New York is about as far from NASCAR Nation as you can get. "I love the sport and I love the people in it, but I see them enough," he says. "I don't need to see them during the week." (The Gordons are also building a house in Charlotte, so that he can be closer to his race team headquarters and business offices.) In New York, he says, "Unless I'm in Times Square, it's very seldom I get recognized."

Gordon's move to New York signals nothing less than him climbing into his own skin. The fact is, he never was a good ol' boy, though for a while early in his career he did try to fit the mold the sport cast for him. He had the obligatory big house on Lake Norman outside of Charlotte, which is kind of like the red-state Malibu. He married a Miss Winston, the Bible-thumping Brooke Sealey, who kept the garish sports-hero mansion in Boca Raton when they divorced. He has admitted to never really liking country music, or hunting or fishing, or relating to any of that stars-and-bars hoo-ha. Having spent a fair chunk of his career trying to appease the fan base — and getting so much grief in return — Gordon has moved on to embrace the man he wants to be.

It's clear the big city has rubbed off on him. "I'm a Prada shoe guy," he says, uttering a sentence Earnhardt Sr. never, ever contemplated. He enjoys good clothes and does his own shopping. "Especially my jeans," he says. "My jeans are me."

Before Ella Sofia was born in June 2007, the Gordons saw a lot of the city's red carpets and restaurants. These days, he says, "We just order takeout from Patsy's." When I ask him about his favorite restaurants, he hems and haws, like he can't remember them, but then the list comes out: Nobu, Neo, Cipriani, Serafina, Il Mulino. That's a pretty nice list for a guy raised in Indiana, where bratwurst is a considered a leafy green vegetable.

How did the biggest star in one of the world's most popular sports, a man adored by millions, come to be so reviled by millions more? It helps to understand the history of the sport. Organized stock car racing was born on red-clay short tracks bulldozed into the woods of the Appalachians in the 1940s and early fifties. Its first heroes were hard men, moonshiners and grease monkeys and country boys whose smiles missed teeth like abandoned buildings miss windows. Stock-car racing was an outgrowth of Southern culture, where the greatest tribute was a trophy named after cigarettes, where the tradition of the honor duel was observed with 3,000-pound hunks of steel, where God and Goodyear were thanked in equal measure. It's hard to imagine, now that NASCAR is a galling lollapalooza of mega-corporate advertising — Sprint, Red Bull, the Principal Financial Group, and so on — but when Gordon entered the sport in the early nineties, it was still a relatively rinky-dink operation.

Then: cosmic inflation. Within the space of a decade, NASCAR had gone corporate. The France family, running the sport out of Daytona Beach, brought racing to Wall Street. Ticket prices skyrocketed. Races at venerated battlefields like Darlington and Rockingham gave way to events in California and Las Vegas. The hard men with the scuffed knuckles and marbles in their mouths started to disappear, replaced by fit young drivers with Hollywood smiles who spoke in complete sentences.

Gordon was one of the first of the new breed, and by far the most successful. He was born in that faraway Gomorrah of California. He grew up in Indiana and learned to race in open-wheel sprint cars, whatever the hell they were. He was slight and nice looking, more jockey than driver. In the multi-generational patriarchy of NASCAR, where fathers pass down their cars to sons (Earnhardt, Petty, Baker, Jarrett, Allison), Gordon was nobody's kin in particular.

Traditional NASCAR fans, particularly in the Deep South, can't forgive him. They associate him with the corporatization of racing, its Californication, merchandizing, suburbanization, and feminization.

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