Anger gone from Las Vegas loss, Jeff Gordon looks for winning groove
Jeff Gordon has put his Las Vegas setback behind him, and will be gunning for career win No. 83 today at Atlanta Motor Speedway. // Lee Holmes, NASCAR Illustrated
HAMPTON, Ga. – Just because Jeff Gordon has won 82 races during his career, that doesn’t mean when a loss slips away it slips from his mind quickly.
A two-tire stop ended up being the wrong call for Gordon last Sunday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where Gordon led 219 laps but ended up third. Teammate Jimmie Johnson, on four tires, won the event. It wasn’t an easy loss for Gordon to swallow.
“That was a tough one,” Gordon said Friday at Atlanta Motor Speedway. “I was pretty angry about that one. By Tuesday or Wednesday I was finally starting to get over it. I feel like we did everything we could as a team. I’m very happy with the results of how we performed, but it was a tough loss.
“Going back to wins in the past, there have been times when we’ve been like that and finished third and I’m like, ‘Hey, no big deal.’ But that was when the wins were coming every five races.”
Gordon isn’t winning every five races today. In fact, he has only one win in his last 80 races.
“These days you don’t want to let races like that slip away from you,” Gordon said. “You want to capitalize on that. And that’s something I feel like we missed out on last year. We finished second eight times because we let some slip away. And that’s something we don’t want to have happen again this year.”
Not only does a team get 10 bonus points for every win when the 12 drivers in the Chase For The Sprint Cup have their points reset to a minimum of 5000 for the 10-race championship schedule, but a victory would just help the team spirit, Gordon said.
“Winning does so much for your confidence as a team,” said Gordon, who is 13th in the standings heading into today’s Kobalt Tools 500. “The bonus points are nice. Third was still good because it got us some valuable points that we needed to get ourselves [closer to] the top 12, but when you dominate like that and you’ve got a car like that, you want to win.
“You don’t just want to dominate; you want to get the result that you feel like you’re capable of.”
The key to winning today, where Gordon starts fifth, will be navigating the high speeds as well as a few bumps on the 1.54-mile Atlanta Motor Speedway oval. Gordon, whose last win here came in October 2003, has four career wins at the track.
“It is fast and then the loads are pretty substantial when you drop it in these corners and get into the banking,” Gordon said. “You really load the car up and have to put a lot of wheel in to it.”
While people seemed to tire of Gordon winning races in the 1990s, a win for him now likely would be a quite popular one. Even track operator Bruton Smith said a Gordon win, much like a win by Dale Earnhardt Jr., the most popular driver, would be good for the sport.
“Jeff Gordon is great for us,” said Smith, chairman of Speedway Motorsports Inc. “He’s very popular. His souvenir sales are better than a lot [of other drivers].”
Not only does Gordon have a big fan base, but also he would fit the “anyone but Jimmie Johnson” category. Johnson has won six of the last 12 Cup races.
“When you win that much, it ticks everybody else off and they all have to work harder and they all get fired up to go out there and try to knock that guy off,” Gordon said. “And you can’t blame those guys for wanting to dominate and that’s great. But you can’t blame the others for wanting to keep them from winning as well. That’s a whole part of sports in general.”
Another part of sports is rivalries, and Gordon admits NASCAR could use more of those. So why not Gordon and Johnson? Well, Gordon recruited Johnson to come to Hendrick Motorsports, he owns part of Johnson’s team and the two are close friends.
“What we need is Kyle Busch and Tony Stewart to be butting heads and … trying to beat one another and talking trash – that’s going to be good television,” Gordon said. “The problem is that Jimmie and I are friends. So we never cross that line. And that’s good and bad.”
So there won’t be one shove or punt of Johnson to start a Gordon-Johnson rivalry?
“Hey, just give me the script and as long as I get to go to victory lane five or six times, you know, I’ll take it,” Gordon said, laughing.
