Jeff Gordon
- Height: 5-7
- Weight: 150
- Born: Aug 4, 1971, Vallejo, CA
News and Notes
Nov 4
This week: Gordon has slipped even further behind and now trails teammate Jimmie Johnson by 192 points. Gordon scored his first Texas victory in April. He has seven top-five and nine top-10 finishes in 17 starts there, but five of the top-10s have come in the last six races. His one finish out of the top-10 was last place in a 43-car field in April 2008. He was second in this race last year. "We are anxious to get back there," he said. "It was obviously a huge win for us as a team going there so many times and from being so close and not getting the win to having just horrendous, terrible days. We ran bad or hit the wall or had a failure, whatever may have happened. It was just one of those tracks that I typically left there wanting to forget as quickly as I could. Now I can't wait to get back there because we had such a strong car. We had worked so hard over the offseason because of what we learned there in November last year to come back to be strong in Texas, knowing that it is a Chase race and it is a race that has haunted us for the last several years. To turn that around was fantastic."
Last week: Gordon was one of the 13 cars in the final crash of the race and was credited with a 20th-place finish. This came after he led four times for 12 laps. "It's no surprise to me," he said of the crash. "I think we all know that's what's going to happen when we come to Talladega. You know everybody is pretty patient throughout the day and just waiting to get crazy at the end. You know it's going to happen eventually. It's a little disappointing for us on the Chevrolet just because we ran out of fuel. I felt like we saved a lot. I certainly didn't think we were going to run out right then, but I guess I'm kind of glad we ran out when we did because we were at least able to get back out there and destroy our car. As long as you can bump-draft ... you're going to have those kinds of incidences. Everybody really used their heads all day long and it was great. With guys staying off of you in the corners I think it definitely allowed us to get to the end. But we had more cars at the end, and you know that it's going to happen coming down with a green-white-checkered finish. It's no different; same old thing as usual."
Etc.: In the 1990s, it was Gordon who was on a championship run similar to what Jimmie Johnson is experiencing now. "Back then from my standpoint, I was loving it," Gordon said. "And it didn't matter to me what other people thought. But there was a rivalry there and it was great. It built up that rivalry because it made people that were Earnhardt fans only hate me more and it built up the people that started to like me; it built that fan base up more. And it was really sort of divided and I think the more you dominate, the more they divide, and that's only a good thing for this sport as well as for Jimmie."
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