Gordon can erase ’14 frustration
Team owner Rick Hendrick’s recollection goes quickly to this seven-day period a year ago. His veteran driver, fourtime Sprint Cup champion Jeff Gordon, had finished second at Martinsville Speedway and came to Texas Motor Speedway leading the standings.
Gordon, then 43, was crafting a spectacularly fitting end to his historic career as he contemplat- ed a retirement he would announce two months later. All Hendrick knew was there was great promise for Gordon to win his first championship at NASCAR’s highest level since 2001. Gordon led the standings because another of Hendrick’s employees, non-title-eligible Dale Earnhardt Jr., had won at Martinsville.
Then Texas happened. Gordon led on a green/white/checker restart. A victory, in the first season of a revised Chase for the Sprint Cup format, would have propelled Gordon into a one-off final with three other title-eligible drivers at Homestead-Miami Speedway. But Team Penske’s Brad Keselowski, seventh in points and in need of a win to advance, wedged his No. 2 Ford through a gap, cutting Gordon’s tire. Gordon spun out and finished 29th, falling to fourth in points. Gordon’s championship hopes were effectively over, and the crews of both teams clashed on pit road after Gordon confronted Keselowski and fellow driver Kevin Harvick budged the 2012 Cup champion into the fray.
Gordon’s runner-up finish at Phoenix International Raceway the next week was insufficient as Harvick won to snatch a finals spot away. It was Harvick who went on to hold the championship trophy.
A year later, this already has been a much more placid week once the ebullient celebrations ended, and it promises to stay that way. Gordon’s wildly popular victory at Martinsville — his first of the season and ninth at the paper-clip-shaped track — will allow him to bypass any of the mayhem certain to accompany the next two races in the third round of the Chase. He will contest for a fifth title in his last race as a fulltime Sprint Cup driver.
Fairy-tale stuff, but Hendrick said he wasn’t surprised.
“When you look at how tough the competition is and there’s only four guys going, am I elated? Absolutely,” Hendrick told USA TODAY Sports. “Am I surprised? Not really. Not when you have to go to Martinsville.”
And given Gordon’s results at Homestead — a win in 2012 and seven top-fives in 16 starts — Hendrick said owner and driver don’t consider qualifying for the final the best-case scenario. Gordon led 161 of 267 laps from the pole at Homestead last season but finished 10th on a botched pit call.
“If we go back to last year, and I think he won four races and he went into this race, Texas, leading here and got taken out and shattered our hopes and dreams,” Hendrick said. “And then he went to Homestead. If you go back and look, he led the first part of that race, and we did not pit him for tires. At the end of last year I knew we had a shot.
“This year, we’ve kind of struggled with the new rules, but he’s been there. We knew going to Martinsville how good he was there. If you look at his record at Homestead, the last two or three years, he’s been real stellar, so our whole deal was, make the Chase, make the rounds and then get to Homestead.”
Getting there was the challenge this season. Gordon admittedly fretted his performance in the middle of the season before he and crew chief Alan Gustafson rallied the team to qualifying for the Chase without a win. To Gordon’s surprise, the No. 24 Chevrolet team advanced into the third round of eight drivers.
The season as a whole had been an odd and often unfulfilling one for Hendrick, whose 11 Cup championships lead the series all time. Six-time champion Jimmie Johnson won four of the first 13 races but flattened and was excused in the first round of the Chase when he sustained a part failure in the elimination race at Dover International Speedway. Earnhardt won two restrictorplate races but was admittedly inconsistent in the Chase and dogged by more pit road woes. He was expelled last round when he couldn’t edge ahead of Joey Logano in a decisive green/white/ checker restart at Talladega Superspeedway. Hendrick’s fourth driver, Kasey Kahne, failed to make the Chase.
Hendrick blamed his organization’s inability to adjust to a new rules package that reduced horsepower and downforce for an overall dip from 13 victories in 2014 to seven this season. But those 13 wins didn’t get Hendrick a driver in the championship final, as Gordon led the organization with a sixth-place finish.
“This dip through the summer was a stretch that we haven’t seen for years and years with our company,” Hendrick said. “And it was not just Jeff. It was all of our cars. We ran really good at restrictor- plate racetracks, we were good at short tracks, but at intermediates we were not all that great. We just worked our butts off, and we’ve gotten much better. Kansas was good for our other guys, not so good for Jeff.”
But, ultimately, Gordon is in position to benefit from the team’s recuperative effort.
“We worked hard and caught up, I think, and we had Martinsville as a target,” Hendrick said. “So if we could make it to there, we thought we had a good shot and where he’s real good at (is) Homestead.
“Let me be perfectly clear: This year was definitely not as good as last year because we won 13 or 14 races; this year, maybe eight. That’s not hateful, but it’s not what we did last year.”
But they didn’t win a championship last year, and Hendrick has a feeling about this Gordon fellow he is sure is more than nostalgic pangs for a driver who helped grow his team into a powerhouse as much as he helped mold modern NASCAR and its model of a driver. This is real.
“I can see it in his eyes, and you could see it at Martinsville,” said Hendrick, who was not on hand to help Gordon celebrate. “He’s got a pep in his step. You show him 10 to go and put him up there, and he’s as good as he ever was in that situation.
“Hey, the worst we can be is fourth. I’ll take that.”
Yet there’s a feeling he anticipates much more.