Hamlin questions strategy, falls short with strong car (cont'd)

Gordon, on the other hand, executed a perfect short-pitting strategy when he came to pit road from the lead at Lap 82. He'd cycled back to the lead by the time the final rainstorm started.

"Everybody had the opportunity to make the same call," an unapologetic Gordon said. "It worked out pretty awesome [for us]."

Unfriendly skies

With different timing, someone else could have been celebrating in Victory Lane.

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After making his four-tire stop Hamlin, who led five times for 49 laps, had a good enough car to steadily auger back to the front, getting to 15th by Lap 70 and into the top 10 before Lap 80. But he had to pull in his horns a bit, he said.

"In hindsight, the risk wasn't worth the reward," Hamlin said. "When you get back there, you have to really burn up the brakes and run your car hard -- harder than I'd like, especially how good it is.

"You never know how many cars are going to take two [tires] or none, so you don't know that. We take the smart, conservative approach. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't."

Sunday, Hamlin felt it didn't. He had regained the lead on a green-flag cycle before he pitted at Lap 93.

But when rain began less than 10 laps later, Hamlin's die was cast and he remained in sixth, as the field circulated under caution for two laps before coming to pit road under a red flag.

After saying on Friday that his team should have won no less than three races already this season, and that gambling for wins might be of the essence, Hamlin was momentarily fit to be tied on his radio as he circulated in what he called pouring rain in the Tunnel Turn.

Hamlin complained that with the Chase format, which resets the point standings after Race 26, the team had to start gambling to win races or wherever they were in the standings wouldn't matter.

Ford responded that Hamlin needed to look at the big picture and that without the four-tire change he might have blown a tire as former second-place point man Jimmie Johnson did, which resulted in a 42nd-place finish for Johnson.

The irony was that Hamlin predicted on Friday just the strategic call he thought his team should have made Sunday.

"We are starting to take the mentality now that we have got to start taking chances of getting wins, because if we are not winning, we are not doing anything," Hamlin said. "We might as well be 12th in points [because] if we are leading [the points] and we don't have a win, it doesn't matter."

After the cutoff for the Chase for the Nextel Cup, teams will be "seeded" for the 10-race Chase with a 10-point bonus for each victory in the first 26 races. After Pocono, Gordon and Hendrick Motorsports teammate Johnson each have four wins and that's driving Hamlin crazy.

"Right now we are going to start to look at damage control," Hamlin said Friday. "At the end of the race, if we just make a crazy call and it burns us, how far is it going to burn us? Is it going to burn us to where we lose 100 points -- or hey, we can lose 50 [and] it is not too big of a deal?"

That was exactly what Ford was weighing on the pit box when he decided to go for four tires.

"First things first," Ford said after the race. "You've got to make the Chase before you can actually worry about getting points inside the Chase.

"So you're a little bit conservative at this point in the season. There's a point when that could possibly change if there's a buffer there -- but we called a conservative race and it got us.

"The top-15 cars didn't win the race. The 24 [Gordon] wasn't very good, he gambled and he won the race. We're not in that boat alone -- it's another example of the best car didn't win the race -- and at least the best 10 didn't win the race [Sunday]."