Gordon takes what he can after rough day at Bristol (cont'd)

"Right now I guess we've got to be happy with an 11th-place finish but I'm disappointed -- we ran terrible," Gordon said. "It was just kind of frustrating. Steve and I were trying our darnedest to get that tight out of the car and we just never could. I tried different lines, everything."

A telling aspect of how bad Gordon's No. 24 Chevrolet is working at a given event comes from monitoring communications between the four-time Cup champion and his crew chief.

When things just ain't right, the descriptions are tinged with varying degrees of cusswords -- which on Sunday was probably appropriate as the five-time Bristol winner Gordon was never able to mount a challenge after he started on the outside of the front row, thanks to NASCAR's rainout lineup procedure.

"Man, we just got tight all day long and we never could get it out of there," Gordon said. "I mean, even on the restarts, shoot, it never would turn, so I knew we were going to lose positions on that last restart."

Since tires are the word of the hour around Sprint Cup racing these days, maybe Gordon and Letarte should have borrowed some from Fred Flintstone Sunday. For sure, nothing else they did seemed to work.

"Shoot, throughout the day we made a lot of adjustments to help it, and it never really did," Gordon said. "So it was kind of unfortunate."

The transition from the previous car configuration to NASCAR's current chassis -- and in the racetrack itself from a precipitously banked 36-degree layout to the current progressive 26-to-30-degree design on a new layer of concrete -- has changed Gordon's dominance.

Gordon won the 2007 pole for this event, his fifth career pole at Thunder Valley, and he finished third and led laps. But that was the old track.

"We battled this track the last time we were here in a similar way," Gordon said. "So actually, in some ways we were better than we were last time."

Last August, he qualified 18th, but only finished 19th, though he did lead two laps.

"I love the racetrack but we haven't figured out how to get our racecar around here -- it could be the way I'm driving it, or the way we're setting it up or a combination of the two," Gordon said. "I don't know -- maybe I don't know how to drive this place.

"We certainly don't have much success here and I can't wait to get it turned around and get our car working like we have before at Bristol. I love the racetrack. We've never had the ability to run two-wide as much as we do now, so with that said I think the racetrack's great."

On Friday Gordon had expressed some concern about the tire combination that would be in use at Bristol and his concerns over his car, as he mentioned, continued all weekend.

With the Goody's Cool Orange 500 at Martinsville Speedway, another short track, coming up in two weeks, Gordon -- who finished second to teammate Jimmie Johnson last Spring at Martinsville and third there in the fall -- said he had no worries over their Bristol woes following them east.

"No concerns -- it's totally different," Gordon said as he walked out the tunnel. "It's not even the same at all with the banking and the speeds that we run here.

"I'm looking forward to the off time and especially spending time with [daughter] Ella and [wife] Ingrid -- kinda just rejuvenating ourselves, evaluate where we're at and go to Martinsville. I always look forward to Martinsville."

Gordon has seven victories at Martinsville, the last coming in 2005, when he swept both events on NASCAR's shortest track.