Arts & Entertainment

Jeff Gordon Takes Morris Journalist for a Joy Ride in Pepsi Ad

Racing legend gets revenge on news editor for calling 2013 commercial a fake.

Car racing legend Jeff Gordon didn’t take kindly to a web editor calling one of the driver’s 2013 commercials a fake.

So he exacted revenge the best way he knew how, taking the editor for a wild ride. It just so happens the “victim” is a Montville native who thought he was headed to North Carolina for a work-related Corvette test drive, according to dailyrecord.com.

Travis Okulski, 27, of Montville is the center of the Gordon Pepsi advertisement that has gone viral over the Internet. The prank, according to dailyrecord.com, was eight months in the making, and everyone from the soda maker to Okulski’s boss was in on it.

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Okulski is the deputy editor of Jalopnik, an automotive blog under the Gawker Media umbrella. The Montville resident was scheduled to take a Z06 Corvette—a vehicle that won’t be released for months—for a test drive in North Carolina. When taking a cab from his hotel to the test drive, he unsuspectingly ends up in the backseat of an ex-con’s taxi, as the video shows.

That ex-con just so happens to be Gordon, who takes Okulski on a wild ride through a closed course, setting the Montville resident into a world of hysteria.

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This time the test drive wasn’t fake, Okulski told dailyrecord.com. Now he’s got the gray hairs to prove it.


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