BRISTOL, Tenn. -- Jeff Gordon left Bristol Motor Speedway Sunday evening a thoroughly beaten man, a ball cap pulled firmly down on his head and a scowl fixed on his face as dark as the skies over Bristol had been most of the weekend.

Five-hundred laps around one of NASCAR's toughest venues will do that to you -- especially when it's spent alternately cursing your car's handling and desperately analyzing it and seeking solutions with your crew chief.

Food City 500

Official Results

Pos.	Driver	Make
1.	Jeff Burton	Chevrolet
2.	Kevin Harvick	Chevrolet
3.	Clint Bowyer	Chevrolet
4.	Greg Biffle	Ford
5.	Dale Earnhardt Jr.	Chevrolet
6.	Denny Hamlin	Toyota
7.	Kasey Kahne	Dodge
8.	Aric Almirola	Chevrolet
9.	David Gilliland	Ford
10.	Matt Kenseth	Ford
11.	Jeff Gordon	Chevrolet

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In the end, Gordon and his Hendrick Motorsports pit boss, crew chief Steve Letarte, basically spent the day out in left field before finishing 11th. Not even a green-white-checkered restart on new tires -- a typical Gordon staple to make gains -- was a plus.

It was more than half an hour after the checkered flag dropped on Food City 500 winner Jeff Burton before Gordon made his way from his No. 24 Chevrolet's transporter.

"We were just regrouping," Gordon said quietly, before he laughed about being ambushed by a tight racecar. "No, we had a little bit of that in practice, but we felt like we worked on it and got it better -- but we didn't.

"We were not very good [Sunday] and to come out of here 11th -- we'll take that."

In his eminently professional style, Gordon politely answered every question posed -- and in the midst of a throng of fans, competitors and media outside Victory Lane, adjacent to the pedestrian tunnel leaving Bristol's infield, he even stopped to field questions from a couple TV crews.

Even though Gordon wasn't sure he had answers to what had troubled he and his crew all weekend.

"That's a great battle, though, for this team to come home 11th, with a car that, to me, was pretty far off," Gordon said. "So we've got some work to do before we come back here, but other than that, we survived, and that's an important part of Bristol."

Burton, despite leading a 1-2-3 Richard Childress Racing sweep, for one wasn't about to dismiss Gordon's potential either at Bristol or anywhere else this season. Burton talked about "awakening a sleeping giant" when he was asked if RCR had overtaken Hendrick as the overall league leader.

Though he considered his performance abysmal, Gordon's average running position Sunday was 11th. He never fell further down the running order than 21st. And when the final tally was run, he had actually gained a position in the Sprint Cup standings, to 14th.

Still, Gordon was searching for sunshine, which had been in short supply most of the weekend, as he left Bristol.

"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.