The days of Winston Cup drivers being under pressure to perform only the track are long gone and not likely to ever return.
While Jeff came along with the right tools at the right time to capitalize on the rising star of NASCAR and its move to the forefront of the American sports public, the emphasis on a drivers personality and PR abilities was well underway.
Think about it. The reason what a driver says, his personality, or his appearance gains any importance is because a large number of people are to both hear and see him. In the early days the only way to hear one of NASCAR's stars was either live or on the MRN broadcasts, mostly only available in the South and not everwhere even there. The only way to see the drivers was at the races, at rare and largely unpublicized public appearances or the extremely limited 20 minute condensations presented on TV at the time.
Beginning in the '80's all that changed. The Daytona 500 was broadcast on network television live and in its entirety for the first time. Some upstart cable broadcastier named ESPN began to show more until by the end of the decade virtually every race was available to a large segment of the population. And drivers were suddenly faced with microphones and cameras immediately following either a win, a mechanical failure,or a crash. Suddenly in sometimes the worst of circumstances he had to try and express himself coherently and reasonably.
There were some classic statements made in those years, DW inviting an entire granstand full of his detractors to a Big K parking lot stands out in my mind, and the sponsors who were already paying the bills for the big teams grasped the importance of their drivers presentations immediately.
And with that a new age of driver skills was born. IMO