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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: No Pressure For Gordon At RIR This Time
Jeff Gordon has quietly put together another stellar season...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted September 09, 2009   Richmond, VA
Jeff Gordon is having another outstanding season. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Unlike so many of his peers, Jeff Gordon can afford to be relaxed this weekend at Richmond International Raceway. Not slack, mind you, but far calmer than the 10 drivers battling for the last eight spots in the Chase for the Sprint Cup.

Gordon, the four-time NASCAR Sprint Cup champion, hasn’t made the kind of headlines Tony Stewart has with his first-year team, or Kyle Busch has with his mercurial nature. What Gordon has done is quietly put together an exemplary season.

With 25 races down on the NASCAR Sprint Cup season, Gordon is second in three key categories to Stewart: Points (3,694-3,457), top-five finishes (13-11) and top 10s (18-17). And like Stewart, he has a guaranteed spot in the Chase, no matter what happens in Saturday night’s Chevy Rock ‘N’ Roll 400 at RIR.

Maybe it’s because he’s older, or maybe because he’s only had one victory this season, but for whatever reason, Gordon hasn’t seemed to be in the headlines much this year.

But he still can be plenty dangerous when the Chase starts. Overall, Gordon has six runner-up finishes, and in his last 12 races this season, he has five top-five and nine top-10 finishes.

As far as Chase seedings go, Gordon will be somewhere between 10 and 40 points behind the leader, depending on what happens Saturday night. All in all, not a bad place to be at all.

Given that Gordon has struggled through back problems all year and he and crew chief Steve Letarte were very unhappy with how 2008 ended, this season has been a breath of fresh air.

“I feel like Steve Letarte has done a great job utilizing the engineering that we have at Hendrick Motorsports and being a great leader,” said Gordon. “I think that you've got to give him a lot of credit. Confidence could have very easily gotten down last year because we didn't have a great season, and we've come back in 2009 really, really strong.”

Gordon has been trying to do his part, too. “My role is (to figure out) what can I do to change my line, to change how I drive the car, to find just those little small things so that I'm contributing just like every other person on the team,” he said.

And this should be a good weekend for the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports team. Gordon has five poles, two victories and 12 top-five finishes at the 0.75-mile oval. In his last five RIR races, Gordon has started from the front row each time and finished in the top 10 every time. That bodes well for Saturday night.

“We're excited to go back to Richmond,” said Letarte. “We felt as a team we almost had a shot at the pole (in May). We qualified second to the No. 83 car. We ran really well in the race, led a lot of laps. We were really aggressive on pit strategy, and it didn't work out. We were stuck on old tires and finished eighth.

“We're excited, though. We're going to have the National Guard on board again,” Letarte said. “It seems like every time we run the silver and black paint scheme we run real well. We're going to honor the Wounded Warriors on the car, and I think it's going to be a great weekend. We're going to run National Guard back-to-back at Richmond and Loudon. The one win we got this year was at Texas in that paint scheme. Hopefully we can get that car into Victory Lane again.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief for SPEEDtv.com, the former Executive Editor of NASCAR Scene and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. He is the author of ?Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of SPEED,? and has appeared on television and radio shows to discuss NASCAR racing. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association. Jensen is the 1997 National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year and has won numerous national and state awards for news reporting, columns and feature writing. The Answer Man is back at SPEEDtv.com. Tom Jensen answers your questions during every race week and looks forward to hearing from you - please e-mail it to



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