CUP: Gordon Changes Driving Style For COT

Sprint Cup

CUP: Gordon Changes Driving Style For COT

By Jeff Gordon’s lofty standards, 2008 wasn’t a very good year for the Hendrick Motorsports driver...

SceneDaily.com | Posted August 22, 2009 Bristol, TN

By Jeff Gordon’s lofty standards, 2008 wasn’t a very good year for the Hendrick Motorsports driver. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

By Jeff Gordon’s lofty standards, 2008 wasn’t a very good year for the Hendrick Motorsports driver. He failed to win a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race, marking the first season he went without a victory since his rookie season of 1993.

Many figured Gordon had lost his touch in NASCAR’s new Cup car, even as teammate Jimmie Johnson was winning another championship.

Other Cup teams had tried radical setups with the new car, which was proving more recalcitrant than anything previously run in the Cup series. Gordon and his No. 24 Hendrick team noticed what other cars were doing, so they did what any good team would do.

They copied.

“We saw that there were teams out there that their car would be rolling through the corner and be sideways, but they were still in the gas and moved forward,” Gordon said Friday at Bristol Motor Speedway on the eve of today's Sharpie 500. “Through inspection you can look at their shocks and springs and different things they are doing to the setup. You don’t know exactly what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, but it gives you some direction.”

Gordon said crew chief Steve Letarte and Hendrick’s engineers used what they had seen other teams do and mapped out a setup on computer simulation programs that were tested on seven-post machines.

“As [2009] came around they said, ‘Hey we think we’ve got a pretty good idea on some things,’” Gordon said. “We got to California and some of the places early and it started working for us. We just picked a direction and went down that path. Once it starts working you get better at it because you’ve worked with it more.”

Many of Gordon’s critics said he couldn’t drive a loose race car, though they figured that’s exactly what the new car needed to be. Gordon, though, said his style hasn’t changed much this year.

“You know I put up with things that maybe in the past I would work on to try to alleviate but that’s just the nature of this car,” Gordon said. “This car, a lot of times you’ve got to give up a loose entry in order to get the car to roll through the middle. Sometimes you even give up the exit to get it to roll through the middle because there aren’t enough tools with this car to get it to do all the things you want it to do.

“We had some of that with the old car, but not near to this level, so you have to go outside of your comfort level and that’s what we did. So there is a little bit from my side, but not a whole lot I can do to change my driving style. Very little.”

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