Gordon opts out of racing No. 7 at New Hampshire

SONOMA, Calif. -- Robby Gordon, a former winner at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, will skip next weekend's race at the one-mile New England oval.

However, Robby Gordon Motorsports won't skip the New Hampshire event, Gordon said Sunday evening in a near-empty Cup Series garage.

RGM, which got back into the top 35 in the Cup owners points a week and a half ago thanks to a penalty to Front Row Motorsports, solidified it when Gordon finished second in the Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Infineon Raceway.

"We don't have enough sponsorship to go and do the race, so P.J. Jones will start the car and run 20 or 30 laps," said Gordon, who won the 2001 season finale at New Hampshire while driving for Richard Childress Racing. "It's ridiculous that we can't find sponsorship, but that's where we are."

Three weeks ago, Gordon elected to skip the opening day of the race weekend at Pocono Raceway, putting Ted Musgrave into his No. 7 Toyota to qualify it while Gordon prepared to run the Baja 500 off-road event for his Robby Gordon Off-Road team. Musgrave failed to qualify.

Gordon missed the Richmond Chase cutoff race last season to do another off-road race, putting David Gilliland in the No. 7 for that event.

Gordon's car has appeared for four of 16 races this season with either no sponsorship or in-house programs, such as RGM's SpeedFactory.tv.

At the beginning of the season, Gordon had indicated his team might have to skip races before he announced a collaboration with BAM Racing to pool sponsorship and technology. He said he would be fully-funded for the two races after NHMS, at Daytona and Chicagoland.

Gordon has competed in the Dakar Rally, which starts and ends in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for the past two years. He said he had planned a trip to Argentina later this week.

"There is no question about us remaining in the top 35," Gordon said. "We're solidly in there with what we managed to accomplish today. It was obviously a good run for us. We came here to win the race, but second place is pretty darn close to winning it.

"My team needs a little bit of morale here and there. This will boost morale back at the workshop. I will say that we'll come to Watkins Glen, guns blazing. We'll get a lot of confidence going into the Glen.

"I believe they'll have confidence going to Watkins Glen that we can actually win that race so we can build some momentum throughout the summer and hopefully have some good runs. We had a very good test at Indy, about a month and a half ago. I'm excited about going there. We got some other race tracks we run good at, not only Watkins Glen, but it will help us build momentum just in general."

Heading to New Hampshire, Gordon has jumped to 32nd in the owners' standings, 101 points clear of 36th.