Gordon upset how Dakar cancellation was handled (cont'd)

"All the equipment was there, all the teams were there, television was set up, all the stuff was set up, and Portugal is not a dangerous area to race. Obviously, it's a safe country. It's a beautiful country. We had the permits to run on roads and trails, some of which were on military proving grounds. We had what we needed to do to race there. Why didn't we go into Morocco and run a few stages in Morocco? The extremists that want to ride the Dakar on motorcycles, give them their money back if they don't want to participate in a 10-day race. But teams like the Hummer teams with ours ... we do it as a business. It's a not a hobby for us. Don't get me wrong, I love to do it, but it's a business for us. We spent an awful, awful lot of money."

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Money he's not sure he'll be able to recoup. The ASO has told competitors it will refund sanctioning fees, but Gordon said that's a fraction of his total costs. There are contingent deals, like one Gordon said he was working on with Microsoft, that were scuttled. Even though his sponsors are signed through 2010, he's worried they'll be hesitant to return. And he wonders if the ASO will find itself targeted by lawsuits, and perhaps so short on cash it will be unable to refund anything at all.

"I don't know what their insurance policies look like, but we had severe loss at Robby Gordon Motorsports, and I don't know what actions we're going to take," Gordon said. "But I think that they misjudged, as a sanctioning body, on what they needed to do for the event. They could have had a race of some sort, and went on with the show for the first seven, eight, 10 [stages]. Prorate the entries or do something like that. You look at our NASCAR entries, those are cheap. An entry for the Dakar is $12,000 per person, not counting the vehicles. I think our entries were $360,000. That's just the entry fees. That's not shipping trucks, that's not hotels is Lisbon. It's a big deal, and it's got me completely messed up right now in the head. Obviously, I'll recover from it like I always do. But I'm extremely disappointed that a sanctioning body could not be better prepared."

The Dakar Rally is no stranger to peril, either through the unforgiving landscape or the occasional bandits that have plagued the race in the past. Gordon, who said he's faced threats as an American driver in the race, said he had arranged for security for his traveling party. But the threats against the race, the murders of the French family, and a subsequent terrorist attack on a Mauritanian military checkpoint were enough to convince the ASO to cancel the event for the first time in its 30-year history.

Gordon still struggles to understand the logic. "Let's put it in perspective," he said. "Eleven people got killed out there. I'm pretty sure in L.A., we kill 11 a night. On the streets of L.A., I'm pretty sure there are 11 a night killed, stabbed, shot, beat up, murdered, I guarantee you just in L.A. Now, you take L.A., Detroit, Chicago, New York, Charlotte -- 11? It's a couple of kids in the back of a pickup truck with a couple of AK-47s [who] shot a couple of people. I'm sorry to say that, but the reality of the thing, it's not like it was this big setup, bombings, or whatever it may be. I feel sorry for the people and families that happened to. But I don't get it. I'm confused."

Now, instead of racing in the sands of North Africa, he's testing near the sands of Daytona Beach. Brendan Gaughan was scheduled to pilot the No. 7 car in the three-day Sprint Cup session, but there was Gordon early Monday morning, carrying a backpack and the weight of the financial loss he's suddenly incurred.

"Our Cup team was ready to go anyways, and now I'm here. I don't know if it's going to help us or not," said Gordon, who said his rally losses will not affect his NASCAR team, which is a separate business entity. "Daytona is about a race team. The driver has to make the right decisions late into the race, but the stuff you learn at the test isn't going to help you make those decisions. The stuff you learn at this test here is how to make the racecar go fast, how to make it handle, how to make it run wide open for full-tank runs at a time, how to make it suck up. They could have done that without me."