Gordon bites lip, bides time before making his move

TALLADEGA, Ala. -- With as far behind the lead draft as Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson ran all day, they should have been required to buy a ticket to Sunday's UAW-Ford 500. Fans in the grandstands were closer to the leader than the Nos. 24 and 48.

But that was the strategy: Sit in the back, avoid the inevitable big crash and be around at the finish.

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"I've never yawned in a racecar in my life," Gordon said. "I yawned back there, just riding along."

Telling a race driver to be patient is like a 90-pound weakling trying to pick a fight with a heavyweight champion. It's just not the brightest thing to do. But when the big picture includes a Nextel Cup championship, you bite your tongue and do what you're told.

It was a calculated gamble for the two Hendrick teammates who are in a nip-and-tuck tussle for the title: Put the race setup on the car, don't worry about where you qualify and save your equipment for the end.

"I've never done that before here," Gordon said. "I actually even told Rick Hendrick earlier in the week coming in here, ... 'I can't do it. I think we've got to go out there and race and just let the chips fall where they may.' And I changed that, talking to Steve [Letarte] and seeing other guys. It was tough. I don't like going out there and just riding in the back. I want to be up there battling for the lead, leading laps and all that stuff."

So Gordon and Johnson puttered around Talladega Superspeedway at a sedate 185 mph, running single file at the tail end of the lead lap, lap after boring lap. They would have played "count the license plates," had there been any license plates to count.

It wouldn't have been a surprise if either one had tried to find something else to listen to on the radio.

"It was terrible," Gordon said. "I'm telling you, it was the hardest thing I've ever had to do in a racecar. I like to think that I've got pretty good patience but that's beyond patience. There's just nothing fun about that, but I knew that was the smart thing and I knew that if we never lost the draft, we could work our way back up there.

"We proved it one other time in the race, right before the green-flag stops came. I knew we could do it. It was just a matter of when we got up there to them, would we be able to do anything with them."

There's one problem with the "passive aggressive" strategy: It requires a series of events to happen in a sequence. (Continued)