Teammates? Jeff Gordon may not give much help to Jimmie Johnson on Sunday
Hendrick Motorsports' Jeff Gordon is third in the Chase For The Sprint Cup standings heading into Sunday's race at Talladega Superspeedway. // Elmer Kappell, NASCAR Scene
TALLADEGA, Ala. – Jeff Gordon says he doesn’t wish any bad luck on Jimmie Johnson in Sunday’s NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Talladega Superspeedway, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to go out of his way to help his Hendrick Motorsports teammate either.
Johnson leads the standings by 118 points over teammate Mark Martin and 150 over Gordon entering the Amp Energy 500, which is considered by many to be the “wild-card” event of the 10 races in NASCAR’s Chase For The Sprint Cup.
The most logical way for Gordon and Martin to gain points on Johnson would be for the defending series three-time champ to be involved in one of Talladega’s familiar multicar crashes while Gordon and Martin avoid it.
"You can't wish anybody that,” Gordon said on Friday at the 2.66-mile track. “The championship is going to play out the way it's going to play out. Whatever is meant to happen is going to happen. All you can do is go out and work really hard and what I'm doing as a driver and everybody else on my team is doing the same thing and we just go out there and try to put ourselves in the best position and in the best finishing position and hopefully that's a win.
“We're not counting ourselves out of this thing by all means, but obviously some things have to happen in order to get us back in it. And those are things that are not in our control. All we can do is control our own race team and do the best we can there."
Talladega, along with Daytona, is one of two tracks on the Cup circuit where drivers use restrictor plates that put drafting – and teamwork – at a premium. Without a drafting partner near the end of a race at Talladega, it’s difficult to win.
The Hendrick organization’s drivers have traditionally worked together well at Daytona and Talladega but that may not be the case as much once the green flag drops on Sunday.
“I think that you get to this point in the season and the Chase and you start to separate yourself when you're battling them for the championship,” said Gordon, a four-time champion. “We'll go to our debriefs and we'll share information and do all those things, but when it comes to what's going to happen on the race track, I don't see the No. 48 [of Johnson] having a lot of friends out there. I might not either, I don't know. I think that we're all in the situation.
“We're more of in a 'must win' situation and they're not. And I know Jimmie is going to be driving like he always does. And if I see it being a position that's going to help us get to the front, then absolutely [I’ll help Johnson].”
Gordon says that pushing a teammate to the front is usually for both the benefit of the one doing the pushing and the one being pushed.
“We work together to better ourselves. It's hard for people to understand that, you know?” he said. “You are teammates, but there is no pecking order. There's no, ‘This is the guy that we all have to help.’ If I were in ninth in points right now, I'd be out there to do whatever I could to help, no doubt about it.
“But until we're mathematically not in this thing, then we're still out there trying to beat those [No. 48] guys and the No. 5 [of Martin] and the No. 42 [of Juan Pablo Montoya] and the No. 14 [of Tony Stewart] and we're treated the same way."
