Violent crash at Glen takes more toll on Gordon's back (cont'd)

It was Hornish's second consecutive rough finish at Watkins Glen. Last year, his car slammed into water barrels as part of a nine-car wreck that was sparked by contact between Michael McDowell and David Gilliland, and sent Bobby Labonte briefly to the hospital. Monday, Hornish went careening into the tire barrier, and didn't see anything after that. By the time his car started spinning, he had closed his eyes.

"After I got hit the first time, the second one came pretty quickly, and I was just hoping there was nobody else there," he said. "It was a big wreck. You don't ever want to make highlights like that."

For Gordon, the accident extended an uncharacteristic streak at what was once one of his better tracks. No driver in NASCAR has more road-course wins than Gordon, with nine at Watkins Glen and Infineon Raceway combined. But since his last victory in Upstate New York in 2001, he's placed inside the top 10 here only once. The wreck that knocked him out of the race was actually his second encounter of the day; his car also took some damage in an earlier crash involving David Stremme and Kevin Harvick. To add insult to injury, Tony Stewart won Monday's race to become the all-time NASCAR win leader at Watkins Glen, with five trips to Victory Lane. Prior to that, he and Gordon had shared the mark.

"The only saving grace is, there are no road courses in the Chase," said Gordon, who finished 37th. "You want the bonus points, you want a good run, you want momentum. We just haven't been good here in quite some time. I think our car was decent [Monday]. We just didn't qualify good enough to show for it. We moved up quite a few spots, which is hard to do on a road course. You don't see anybody passing unless they've got fresh tires out there. I got caught in that first incident, and that really messed up our strategy. We were making some ground up until that happened."

But of larger concern than his race result was his back.

"Oh man, my left side and my back are super sore," he said. "It's going to take probably a couple of weeks for it to heal completely, and then we'll be back to new. This happened at Dover, when I hit the wall at Dover. This is a little bit different angle, and it's hurting. But luckily we have Michigan coming up next weekend, and it's pretty easy."

Yet Gordon will admit, his back can't take impacts like that very often. Right now, it's just a matter of managing the discomfort.

"There's nothing you can do," he said. "You've got to get out there and just hope that you don't get into those situations. I mean, it's not life-threatening or anything, it's just painful. I've had MRIs and everything else after these things, and everything looks fine. It's just some spasms that go on, and you try to calm that down. but it doesn't just calm itself down in a day. It does take a couple of weeks."

High-speed crashes at Watkins Glen are nothing new; J.D. McDuffie was killed in a 1991 wreck that led to the creation of the "bus stop" chicane on the backstretch, and Jimmie Johnson walked away from a terrifying 2000 accident in the former Busch Series that saw his car veer off the track and slam head-first into a foam-filled barrier. Dale Earnhardt Jr. had a scary impact himself Monday, when his car ran off the road, made contact with the vehicle of Reed Sorenson, and barreled through a gravel trap and into a tire barrier. Earnhardt said he applied the brakes on his No. 88 car entering Turn 3, and the pedal went straight to the floor.

"I ain't never had the brakes just completely fail on a car like that, so that was really an experience," said Earnhardt, who finished 39th and fell to 25th in points. "I'm glad the gravel trap did a little bit of work there, and worked fine in that tire barrier. But it's been a tough year, man. I guess if I sat there and thought about all the bad things and got further down, it would just be a longer time to get back, and you've just got to have some kind of positive thoughts and pull something out of it to keep you feeling like you've got a shot the next weekend and the next weekend. So we can't give up. We can't quit. We've just got to keep trying."

The two biggest crashes of the weekend, those involving Leffler and Hornish, both occurred at what drivers call the "carousel" turn, where the shorter NASCAR layout splits off from the longer track used by open-wheel cars. Stewart is confident that NASCAR will re-examine that area before the circuit returns to Watkins Glen next season.

"I'm sure NASCAR will look at it," Stewart said. "They have a great staff that can analyze what needs to be done. I guarantee you they'll look at that after this weekend, I'm sure. The hard part is, that's a part of the track where it splits into the long course and breaks off to go to the short course. That kind of presents a problem on what flexibility you really have there. But the good thing is, what they've done there is safe enough it kept people from getting hurt. The bad part is, when those two cars hit, it put them back into the race track. That makes you look to see if you can do anything different. I guarantee that NASCAR will be on top of that this week, and try to find a way to make that where it doesn't happen again."