Pit strategy pays off for No. 24 team, puts Gordon 10th in points
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LONG POND, Pa.– Four-time premier series champion Jeff Gordon ended his Pocono Raceway career with a record-tying 20th top-five finish in his 46th start at the track.
After sitting 16th with 10 laps to go, no one was more shocked than Gordon when he crossed the start/finish line bearing his name in third place as several cars on differing pit strategies ran out of fuel before the end.
“Well, it would be a long, long list if we talked to a bunch of people in the grandstands and myself, and everybody on pit road and probably people watching at home to find out who was more surprised,” Gordon said. “That was crazy.”
As he attempted to extend his track record win total to seven while also earning a Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup berth, Gordon’s team stayed out under the Lap 17 competition caution and climbed to second following a 10th-place qualifying effort. But five more cautions in the first half of the race found the No. 24 car in 16th at the midway mark.
Gordon moved up to sixth place 10 laps later, but the seventh and final caution at Lap 93 dropped him outside of the top 15 again.
“I’m not exactly sure where I started on that first restart but it was like 15th, 16th and I can’t say I passed many cars,” Gordon said. “We just kind of hovered around that area, wasn’t real pleased with how our car was in traffic, and when we were up front we were pretty good, felt like we were a top-five car,” Gordon said, echoing the comments of Hendrick Motorsports teammate Dale Earnhardt Jr., who finished fourth.
“But we played the fuel‑mileage strategy pretty early on and that lost us track position and we weren’t able to climb our way up through there,” Gordon continued. “And we continued to play that strategy and I’m proud of Alan (Gustafson, crew chief) for sticking with it. There at the end, we were one of the last ones to pit, which allowed us to run hard all the way to the finish, not having to conserve or save fuel.”
During the race, though, the strategy didn’t inspire confidence in the driver, who never thought he would have earned a top-five finish or even his 32nd top-10 result, second-best to Mark Martin‘s 34.
“The script I had played out in my head was we were going to be 15th, so this one was way better than that,” Gordon said. “For whatever reason, the last couple times we’ve been here, we’ve had decent race cars, not maybe the cars that we would have liked to have had, but cars far capable of better finishes than what we’ve had, have been getting, and just a lot of different circumstances not playing out. Some to our own credit and others just circumstances.
“Today finally one went our way for a change, which is really nice to bounce back after last week’s unfortunate incident where we lost so many points.”
Following a 42nd-place finish at Indianapolis, Gordon dropped to 11th place in the points standings. He bounced back to 10th after Pocono, encouraging Gordon in his quest to make the playoffs — with five races until the start of the Chase — and his hopes to make his drive for five championships.
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“As a team, even though we’re not performing to the level we want to, we are performing well enough to make it into the Chase,” Gordon said. “If you knew that you were going to finish between 10th and 15th every week here going forward, but just like what happened last week, you can’t afford to have many 42nd-place finishes. That could be disastrous. There are no guarantees, and so you’ve got to gain all the points you can when you have the opportunity. We had that opportunity today; we did it.”
The series heads to Watkins Glen next Sunday for the Cheez-It 355 at The Glen (2 p.m. ET, NBCSN, MRN, SiriusXM), and Gordon believes he has a shot at tying Tony Stewart‘s record of five wins on the road course after a stout effort in 2014 that found him racing road-course ace Marcos Ambrose for the lead until a mechanical failure dropped him to a 34th-place finish.
“The one thing that’s encouraging to me is last year I thought we were really strong there, and we had … some kind of battery connection issue and we lost power, so we never saw it play out. That happened ‑‑ I think we were running second to Ambrose at the time. I’m encouraged by that. I’m looking forward to going back there. I know our aero package is a little bit different, but you know, I don’t think it’s that much different from what we had last year, so hopefully we can have another strong finish and performance there. That would be awesome.
“We need them — right now every race is so critical for us. We can’t afford to have finishes like we had last week at Indy, and so we’re going to have to attack and be on — just marching forward to be aggressive to try to get those good points and finishes and hopefully a win.”