Gordon comes up short at M'ville but is still smiling (cont'd)

Gordon started second next to pole winner Ryan Newman and took the lead on Lap 22 to pace his seventh consecutive Martinsville race. Gordon led 25 laps there and then was out front again from Lap 49 to 58. But he only led one more lap in the race, under caution, at Lap 178.

"It was good on the longer runs, even though I felt we were off for the first third of the race," Gordon said. "But I feel like after the halfway point we started getting it dialed in, and we showed it that one long run."

The race's longest green flag run lasted 139 laps, from 306 to 444, when the outbreak of cautions resumed. Gordon had struggled to remain near the top 10 for the 100 laps before that, but moved forward under green until he was running well into the top five when the 12th caution fell.

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"We needed the long runs, that was pretty obvious," Gordon said. "We were able to get by Juan [Montoya, who finished third] on that last run. On the restart I just could not get back in the gas off the corners. It's unfortunate. I didn't want to see that restart. I think we might have been able to get to Jimmie too, but who knows? It was still a great day for us."

Gordon, like his teammates, was soundly trounced by Hamlin's crew on the last pit stop when Hamlin's bunch got him out of the service alley in 13.7 seconds to 15 seconds for Martin's crew, 16.7 for Gordon's and 17.1 for Johnson's. Gordon still staunchly came to the defense of crew chief Steve Letarte and his crew.

"We were really struggling with drive off [the corners] early in the race -- maybe it was the cloud cover or adjustments that Steve made," Gordon said. "I was real proud of them. They had great pit stops and they never gave up. We got way behind at times and it didn't look like we were going to make our way back to the front.

"But we needed more long runs and we finally got it and that long run [from Lap 306] is what got us back into it. We drove all the way back up to third or fourth [and I'm] real happy. Wish we could have won it. Wish we could have finished maybe one or two positions forward, but we'll take it."

With NASCAR's new car, passing is never easy anywhere, but Gordon said that seemed "to be really challenging."

"Our car was just really good on the long runs, so on the long runs we could pass guys fairly easily. But on the short runs, which is fairly common, it just seemed like we struggled more than normal.

"Plus with the double-file restarts you've got a lot of good cars up front and just the aerodynamics affect even a short track. But I think our car just really wasn't quite tuned up for the shorter runs. It was much better on the longer runs and we had the long run that we needed and drove all the way up there and then had the caution that we really didn't need."