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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Showdown Sunday For Gordon
Jeff Gordon’s drive for five has not gotten off to the start he had hoped for...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted September 26, 2009   Dover, DE
Jeff Gordon is currently in tenth position in the NASCAR Chase for the Sprint Cup as the series heads to Dover International Speedway. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Jeff Gordon needs a big showing Sunday at Dover International Speedway to make sure his Drive For Five doesn’t get stuck in neutral in just the second race.

Gordon opened this year’s edition of the Chase for the Sprint Cup with a disappointing 15th-place finish at Loudon, N.H., last weekend, leaving him 102 points behind his Hendrick Motorsports teammate Mark Martin.

This weekend hasn’t looked a whole lot better, either. Gordon qualified a respectable seventh for the AAA 400 at Dover, but in Saturday’s two practice rounds he was just 31st in the morning and 19th in the final Happy Hour session. Gordon knows that won’t cut it on Sunday. On the other hand, neither he nor his team are panicking.

“Obviously we’ve got some ground to make up but we’re not sitting here going, ‘OK we’ve got to make it all up right here at Dover. We’re in a do or die situation.’ We’re not,” said Gordon, a four-time Dover winner. “We’re looking at it as nine races. We’ve got nine races to get our consistency up, our performance up. We’ve got to lead some laps. When we’re in a position to battle for a win we’ve got to pull off the win.”

Still, Gordon knows that he can ill-afford another repeat of last weekend’s race at New Hampshire, where nine of the other 11 Chase drivers finished ahead of him on the track.

“Last week wasn’t our best performance,” said Gordon, who has a series-high six runner-up finishes this year. “It was just one of those days where the car was off a little bit on the restarts, we tried to adjust for it and it didn’t help. We did some pit strategy where we had some issues on the pit stop. It was just one of those days all the way around. It just wasn’t our day so we came out of there 15th. That’s not terrible even though we are (102) points behind.”

Gordon, now one of NASCAR’s most experienced drivers, understands what he and his crew have to do on Sunday: Shake off any lingering effects from last Sunday with a solid performance that will move him closer to the front in points.

“We can’t look at that as a devastating day in our Chase or think that it’s over because it’s certainly not,” Gordon said of last week’s race. “We’ve seen in the past where there’s been much bigger deficits. But we definitely need to have a solid performance this weekend and we’ve got to capitalize at the tracks that are our best tracks.”


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