Gordon has finished 34th or worse in the six events he has qualified for in 2005. Credit: Autostock

Claire B. Lang interviews Robby Gordon

Claire B. Lang is the host of "Dialed In", which airs Monday through Friday from 4pm-7pm ET on XM Satellite Radio's 24-hour NASCAR Radio Channel 144. Claire also anchors coverage of the races each weekend at the track. On Friday at Darlington, Claire spoke one-on-one with Robby Gordon, who owns and drives the No. 7 Harrah's Chevrolet, about changes on the team, and the challenges of being both behind the wheel and calling the shots as the owner.

Claire B. Lang

Claire: Robby, you have a new crew chief this weekend and some expected changes on your team. What have you done and what are you doing?

Robby Gordon: Well, we've done two changes. Greg Irwin actually started with us last weekend and advised for us at Talladega, and we know where we missed it there, and that was a little bit expected heading down the road to Talladega. We got back, did some evaluation with our speedway car, and feel we know where we need to improve to more competitive in July. Greg has moved into the crew chief position, and Frank Kerr, who ran my Busch car last year with Bob Temple has come back as a team manager position. I think between Frank and Greg we'll be able to move forward here and hopefully be a lot more respectable than where we started out the season.

We were really good at Charlotte. We never did a qualifying run, but in race runs we were 29-flat to 29-twenties, which is as good as anybody there, but we'll come back in a couple of weeks and prove that. It looks like we are making improvements, and I'm really proud of all the hard work that everybody's done. We just needed a little bit of direction. And a new team, we've chased the battle of building cars and getting our inventory of race cars up. We've chased the battle of a new engine supplier with Menard Engineering, which builds Indy car engines. They're new to the Nextel Cup level. I feel pretty confident that we will be more competitive, week in and week out, from here on out.

Claire: Is this harder than you thought it was going to be? You're a person who does not ever give up and you're talking about light at the end of the tunnel. Your guys have been working, burning the midnight oil, putting in some long hours. Is this more than you thought you were going to bite off?

Robby Gordon: (laughs) Claire, midnight oil is an understatement of the amount of work that the guys at my facility have done for us on this race team. The biggest thing that I underestimated was not having an inventory of race cars to start out. But today, we have built 8 brand new cars since November, we have built two speedway cars, two intermediate cars, two short-track cars, and two road course cars that are actually in paint right now. So we will be ahead of time heading to the road races as well.

Robby Gordon

We've got another intermediate car in pre-body. It heads to body the beginning of next week. And we've got another short-track car coming down the line. So that will bring us up to 10 cars, and we'll have a full fleet, and hopefully be able to risk them a little more on the weekends as well.

Another big thing that's hurting us is being outside that top 35. When it comes time to qualify, you've got to be a little bit conservative because if you mess up in qualifying like I did at Bristol coming off of Turn 4 on the first lap it messed up the second lap as well. We've just got to get a little more consistent, get our cars driving a little better, and get ourselves inside the top 35. Once we do that, I think we'll be able to race a lot better.

Claire: When you get in the car and you have all that on your shoulders, how do you qualify with all that resting on it, as opposed to how you did it before driving for someone else?

Robby Gordon: Well, I've always done it in one way or another. You know, last year, the Indy 500 with our own car, or the Busch car last year which we won races with our race team. I probably underestimated how competitive the Cup level is compared to Busch. You know, everybody says, "We won races in Busch. We'll go up to Cup. We'll be just fine." And that wasn't the case.

When we came to Cup, we overlooked a few big things. Obviously, the power plants that we were getting for our Busch program from RCR and a pit crew that was excellent last year. We've worked really hard on building a new pit crew, one that obviously works at Robby Gordon Motorsports now. We're working with Menard Engineering on their power plants, and like I said we are starting to see a little bit of light. We know we have a long ways to go, but at least we're starting to be a bit more competitive.

Claire: Are you that much of an eternal optimist, or do you really just believe so much in this and want it so bad that you will, literally, will it to happen.

Robby Gordon: Well, what I do know is there's a rate heading up that teams learn, week in and week out, and we know we have to turn our rate up higher, because if we progress the same level as them, we're never going to catch up. So I can guarantee you nobody's working any harder than we are to catch up to the goalpost where they're at. Unfortunately it's going to take more hours, and more research and more development to be able to do that.

Courtesy of XM Satellite Radio