Gordon makes a statement much bigger than one race

FORT WORTH, Texas -- It's over.

Forty-seven races. Seventy-seven calendar weeks. Five hundred and forty days. Twelve thousand, nine hundred and sixty hours. All of it a seeming eternity since the last time Jeff Gordon slid out of a race car in Victory Lane after a points-paying event in NASCAR's premier series. The longest winless drought of the four-time champion's career has finally come to an end, and he has a bright white cowboy hat and a pair of Beretta six-shooters to prove it.

Everyone knew it was inevitable. After a rocky 2008 season -- relative to the atmospherically high standards of the No. 24 team -- Gordon has been in the mix at the end almost every week. It was only a matter of time before the Hendrick Motorsports standard-bearer once again spun smoking doughnuts along the frontstretch, as he did Sunday afternoon. Anyone who thought Gordon was done, who honestly believed that his October 2007 victory at Lowe's Motor Speedway would go down as his last, was in serious need of either anger management classes or a reality check.

But for the skid-snapper to come at Texas Motor Speedway, one of only two active Sprint Cup facilities where he had never won, a place where he crashed last season and where his championship hopes effectively died the year before? That's always seemed about as likely as the New Orleans Saints coming to Texas Stadium and whipping the boys with blue stars on their helmets, like ordering fish at one of the excellent steakhouses in the historic Stockyards district, like finding a homely coed over at TCU. Even Gordon will admit he's felt lost on this beastly 1.5-mile tri-oval. In the debriefing with crew chief Steve Letarte following Saturday's final practice, his suggestion on how to improve the car for the race was a succinct one: No idea.

"I would say 90 percent of the tracks we go to, I have a pretty good idea of what I need to do in the car and what I need to do as a driver to get around that track and be fast. I think that's what's helped contribute to our success," Gordon said. "... I'm telling you, at Texas, I'm just lost. This is one of the toughest race tracks out there. The transitions getting into the corner, off the corner, are unlike any other. The corners are extremely fast. There are some good bumps out there. I believe for me personally, and some other guys would probably back it up, it's the most challenging mile-and-a-half track we go to."

And yet there he was, using a little bit of pit strategy to gain some track position, taking advantage of a pit road mistake by Carl Edwards during the final round of stops, and running away from the field at the end. For Gordon to win at Texas, a place that's frustrated him so much that he left his wife and daughter at home so he could devote his full attention to the track, portends things much bigger than Sunday itself. This isn't a victory in a Daytona qualifying sprint, which he recorded in February. This is a validation of all the moves Letarte made over the offseason in reorganizing the team's engineering and support staff. This is an unequivocal statement that Gordon's struggles of last year are behind him, and that the road to the Sprint Cup championship goes through the No. 24 shop.

"At the end of [last] season, I wrote Steve an e-mail and we talked a lot," said Gordon, who has now won on every active Sprint Cup track except Homestead-Miami Speedway. "I just saw the progress we made in the final 10 races with how Steve was restructuring the engineering and the team and his efforts. It just fired me up and made me wanted to do even more than I already was. This whole year has been like that since Daytona. You just see a different look in the guys' eyes. You see a different effort that's being put out. It's not that you can work any harder, it's just different. The guys are just positive and have a bounce in their step. All of us, including me and Steve. And when you have that ... all you're missing is that victory, and I can't believe it happened at Texas."

It felt, Gordon said, like the first time he had ever won a race. He made a victory lap around the track holding the checkered flag out the window, a celebratory practice yet to come en vogue when Gordon won the last time all those weeks ago, something he hadn't done since he was a middle-schooler racing quarter-midget cars. He unleashed not one but two burnouts, one on each straightaway to make sure no fans felt shortchanged, blowing up his rear tires in the process. All those whispers about his best days maybe being behind him floated away like the white smoke drifting over the grandstand.

"When you have the high expectations that this team has, and you go through what this team's gone though with all the wins, and then you don't win, and you have to hear it every day, every weekend -- 'When are you going to win? When are you going to win?' -- you go long enough, and you feel like you've never won a race ever," he said.

"I don't know how many more years I do have left. So when you know that the cars are there and the team's there and you still think you've got it or you want to prove to yourself, I wanted to make sure there were no excuses. Just like Steve says, no excuses. And so I'm giving these guys everything that I've got and we're doing things a little different, and it's all paying off."

Now the skid is behind him, and the pressure eases a bit, and the larger picture comes into clearer focus. With six straight finishes of sixth of better -- every race this year except the Daytona 500, where he finished 13th -- Gordon is beginning to show flashes of the driver who racked up an astonishing 30 top-10s in his near-miss championship campaign of 2007.

There are no more questions about his ability to pilot the current chassis on intermediate speedways. There are no more grumblings from the grandstand about Letarte, a popular target of derision last year. There is no reason why a driver who has now conquered his worst track, a place where he appeared completely helpless last spring, can't use Sunday as a springboard to much greater things.

"If we can win at Texas," Gordon said, "I feel like we can win anywhere."

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.

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• Final Laps | Victory Lane | Press Pass: Jeff Gordon