Thank fuel mileage for the best race of the season (cont'd)

"I think typically, when you think fuel-mileage races, you think boring. This was not a boring fuel-mileage race," said Jeff Gordon, who may be a little biased because the failures in front of him allowed him to finish second. "There was hard racing all the way down to the finish, and the two guys leading didn't make it. I thought that was great."

Johnson and Biffle may argue otherwise, but the consensus after the event was that they had no one to blame but themselves. As the final laps wound down, both crew chiefs told their drivers that the time was coming for them to back down. Greg Erwin, Biffle's crew chief, estimated that the No. 16 car was going to be about half a lap short -- a calculation that turned out to be entirely accurate. But with the lead with 10 to go, and without a victory this season, and knowing how much bonus points mean in the Chase, he turned his driver loose.

“

I think typically, when you think fuel-mileage races, you think boring. This was not a boring fuel-mileage race. There was hard racing all the way down to the finish, and the two guys leading didn't make it. I thought that was great.

”

-- JEFF GORDON

"Run it like you need to, buddy," he told Biffle. "Let's go."

Later, he explained why. "I felt like we had to go for the win," Erwin said after Biffle had finished fifth. "... We'd just been so close so many times, between Texas and California and Las Vegas, our performance at Darlington. We've had a handful of these mile-and-a-half and two-mile race tracks that could have been W's for us, but we came up a little bit short. He didn't want to lay down and finish second or third. He wanted to make a charge at the win. We did it as a team."

Meanwhile, Knaus was having to make his own difficult decisions. With 15 remaining, he told Johnson that he had six more laps to run down Biffle, who had come out ahead of the No. 48 car in the afternoon's final round of pit stops. Erwin had to know what Knaus was thinking; soon afterward, he told Biffle it was only a matter of time before Johnson eased up. The final green-flag run was 45 laps, so everybody was going to be close on fuel. But nobody wanted to back down, either.

"I knew I wouldn't be able to make it with the pace the 48 was running," Biffle said. "I could run a lot faster than I was running. In fact, I picked it up a half a second to run his lap times. But I thought to myself, 'There's no way we're going to make it.'"

Johnson finally nosed into the lead with six laps remaining, just beyond Knaus' original window. "All right guys," Knaus told his team over the radio. "We only want to go fast enough to keep the 16 behind us, copy?"

Copy. And they did just that, until the fuel tank ran dry and the No. 48 car began its achingly slow backpedal. Johnson was understandably livid over the radio. Afterward, he was considerably more composed. Maybe, he surmised, they used up too much fuel overtaking Martin for second. Maybe they should have let Biffle go and taken their chances.

"I guess if we would have held back we would have finished second or third, and I guess maybe the 16 would have run out and I still would have won," Johnson said. "But I can't be disappointed with the fuel. The 48 car, myself, whatever it is, we don't get the best fuel mileage, and we're always fast. So I'll take being fast and losing every now and then on fuel mileage." (Continued)