Truex a dangerous man, and not just for Gordon (cont'd)

"I haven't seen much respect all year to be honest with you, on the race track," Truex Jr. said. "Guys take advantage of you every chance they get. We get put in a difficult position because the field is so close -- every spot means so much. The clean air situation, it's every spot means so much and there's so much pressure on us to get everything we can get.

"I think guys just cross the line too much. I don't know what the answers are to fix that, I just know how I'm going to do it and I'm just going to do what everybody else does to me every week."

That starts with Sunday's race at New Hampshire, a track where Truex had four consecutive top-seven finishes in 2007-2008 before he finished 37th and 19th last season -- getting wiped out in an accident at this event a year ago.

Truex Jr. had recently gotten himself into position to challenge for a Chase position, where he last raced for the championship in 2007, and he feels his team can still compete.

"The points are all that matters and there is a lot of pressure on our teams to get in [to the Chase]," Truex Jr. said. "Coming into this season, that was a big goal of ours and I feel like we haven't quite been good enough to get in that safe zone. We've been kind of hanging out in that danger zone and it only takes one guy's mistake -- like last week -- to almost take our shot away.

"We were sitting there in decent shape after [two weeks ago], yeah, the Pocono deal where some guys lost their heads [on the last lap] and cost us some points -- that happened again last week. We were going to have a great day and the way we were running, we were sitting there looking at being right back at the doorstep of 12th-place again.

"We were going to be real close so we were out-running the guys that were around us in points last week and we go from the high of feeling that and running well and feeling like we're doing a good job to leaving there 42nd, [157] points down and 19th [in the standings].

"At the end of the day, we're still 19th. It doesn't matter how we got there, everybody looks at us and says, 'You're 19th.' That is very, very frustrating. Nobody understands how difficult that is to deal with and that's what we deal with each week."

And make no mistake, Truex Jr. will deal with it, in his own time and in his own way.

"There's no saying that I'm going to pay [Gordon] back," Truex Jr. said. "Am I going to do what he did to me? I'm not going to stand here and say I am. I'm going to change the way I race him, yeah.

"I've always been very, very respectful -- I just have never got that back. It's just one of those deals where you race with a guy like Mark Martin and you run him down from a straightaway and he lets you go because he doesn't want to hold himself up, but at the same time he's doing you a favor.

"You run Jeff down -- if I run Jeff down from a straightaway -- he races me like we're going for the win [and] when he catches me, I don't do that to him. It's little things like that that you can do that make some people's world a living hell sometimes.

"There's been times when Jeff's caught me and never even give me a chance to get out of the way, he just started running into me and he's the first guy to hang his middle finger out the window when he goes by you. Things are going to change, that's all I'm saying."

And Denny Hamlin, who's been on a tear lately but has also run into a person or two throughout his rise to the top of the proverbial Cup Series competition meter, said he knows what Gordon faces.

"I think you're seeing a lot of self-policing going on out there, but trust me, Jeff Gordon will be looking in his mirror for the next x-amount of weeks knowing, 'Did I wreck that guy? Did I wreck that guy?'" Hamlin said. "It's just part of it. If I was in his shoes, I'd be doing the same thing because you know that everyone else has one up on you and they owe you.

"I don't think you'll see anything blatant, but trust me, there's gonna be guys that maybe I did wrong or he did wrong that are going to race you harder in the long run because you did that. Payback is not always about wrecking a guy -- it's more just sitting in his mirror and making him think."

"Like I said, I'm going to deal with whatever comes my way," Gordon said. "When you hit a guy, there are several ways that the whole thing goes down. If you run into a guy for no reason, then you should know that you're going to have to deal with something going forward -- either the guy is going to have a lot of patience and just loom there and make you sweat it out, or he's going to get you back right away.

"You don't know how they're going to deal with it. You just know that you probably have one coming from them. That's something that I can't control. All I can do is go out there and race the best that I can and try to avoid incidents, try to make life a little easier on them, because they're owed that. At the same time we're out there trying to win races, so we've got to keep doing that as well."

Video:
• Race Rewind: Sonoma | Gordon: Get in line | Rough racing