Proof is in the pudding: Robby Gordon is a winner (cont'd)

I know I do, and that leads to No. 3.

Look at it this way. In 14 days the event covers around 6,000 miles, or just less than half the mileage in an entire Sprint Cup season. But it does it in only two weeks! It's like a race a day with only one rest day in the middle, and precious little time for sleep.

To finish that qualifies you as a winner and to finish in the top 10, as Gordon has done before and is heartily on his way to doing again, makes you championship-caliber in my book -- because the different traits you deal with on this rally aren't like the differences between Daytona and Martinsville or even Watkins Glen.

Oh no, no, no -- not even close. Those are all asphalt race tracks, even though the configurations are vastly different. But they're kid stuff when compared to the Dakar.

Start off with rough, slick and dusty gravel roads; segue to towering sand dunes with virtually no directional landmarks, to slithery mud flats bisected by the odd dry, rock-infested river bed. At least with only five races -- err, stages remaining, Gordon has survived it all, which earns Gold Star No. 4.

Yeah, he might have been behind by about 94 minutes after a scintillating, third place run in Monday's ninth stage, which was about six hours worth of racing -- but at this point anyone who wouldn't consider Gordon ending the nearly 300-mile jaunt across sand and gravel only 136 seconds behind overall leader Carlos Sainz a victory, is nuts.

Count No. 5.

When you consider that 94-minute gap included the time it took to recover from a flip in the middle of stage four, that rates Gordon a big, fat No. 6 and raises him above the level of his teammate, Frenchman Eric Vigouroux, who's driving the second Team Dakar USA Hummer but is hours behind Sainz.

Chasing another competitor on a dusty Argentine track, Gordon pushed straight ahead on a shallow right-hand bend, got to bouncing through the terrain and ultimately turned over once -- gritting his teeth terribly through each jarring bounce.

But get this -- once the car stopped and was shut off, Gordon took only 29 seconds to extricate himself from the driver's seat, get out, assess the lack of damage, get back into the Hummer's cockpit and re-fire the engine.

Seven seconds later -- or 36 seconds after the car had stopped its single roll -- his car was moving again, though it did sound terribly chunky.

Folks, that's a winner, when it comes to motorsports. Of course, it probably helped that, unlike Dale Earnhardt's similar feat in the 1997 Daytona 500, that Gordon had neither an ambulance or wrecker crew to deal with in Argentina.

The only points Gordon loses come from not fastening his seat belts before he was bounding across the desert once again. Then again, maybe that's the way winners do it.

No idea if Big E was belted in when he made his way back to Daytona's pit road with his seriously disheveled No. 3 Chevrolet.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.