NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
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CUP: Gordon Needs To Get Going In Kansas
Jeff Gordon won his last NASCAR Sprint Cup championship in 2001...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted September 27, 2010   Charlotte, NC
Jeff Gordon Jumped to fifth in the NASCAR Sprint Cup standings on Sunday at Kansas Speedway. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
It’s still very, very early in the Chase for the Sprint Cup, but Jeff Gordon knows he and his Hendrick Motorsports crew left a little bit on the table Sunday afternoon at Dover International Speedway.

Gordon, the four-time NASCAR Sprint Cup champion, pulled into the pits for the last time while running seventh in the closing laps of the AAA 400, apparently headed for a second-consecutive top-10 finish to go with the sixth-place run he had posted a week earlier at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.

But the green-flag stop went horribly wrong, a simple dropped lugnut on a front tire meant that the stop took an agonizing 17.7 seconds. This on a day when Kyle Busch’s crew was routinely making stops in the high 12-second bracket. Gordon re-entered the race in 12th and was able to chug by teammate Mark Martin in the closing laps to finish 11th. Still, losing five spots on pit road probably cost him 21 points, the difference between being eighth in points, where he is now, and fifth place.

More importantly, one never knows at this spot in the season whether or not those 21 points might be the difference between finally fulfilling his “drive for five,” and winning a fifth championship, or watching someone else when it.

“You can't give up those positions,” said Gordon, "especially when you come to a place like this where most of the Chase guys are going to be up front. Really at most places, the Chase guys are going to be up front.”

As has been the case on numerous occasions this season, the handling on Gordon’s No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet seemed to change drastically as the race wore on.
A slow pit stop crippled Jeff Gordon on Sunday at Dover. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

“The first half of the race went pretty good,” said Gordon. “The second half, when the rubber laid down, man, we just really struggled. It was everything I could do to just hang on to it, let alone finish 11th. So things didn't go our way there at the end. We lost some extra positions and just held on for 11th. That's all we can do.”

This week, Gordon and the rest of the Sprint Cup regulars will head to the 1.5-mile Kansas Speedway, a place where Gordon won the first two Cup races in 2001 and ’02, and has finished in the top five the last three races.

Gordon is hoping Kansas proves more hospitable than Dover, which is not one of his favorite facilities.

“I love Kansas,” he said. “We knew coming in here (Dover) that this was going to be a struggle for us. But we were up there in the top five and we were maybe about a seventh-place car and we were wanting to at least maintain that, but we didn't. So now we go to Kansas and some other places that I think are much better tracks for us, and we've got to capitalize on that.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100 and e-mail him at Jensen is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of Speed,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association and an NMPA Writer of the Year.

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