Gordon gets room to breathe post-Charlotte

A win at Talladega would guarantee Gordon one of the eight positions that will advance into the Eliminator Round (Martinsville, Texas and Phoenix), and keep his hopes for a fifth championship alive.

But a victory at Talladega is anything but a guarantee for Gordon or any one of the other 42 drivers that will line up to take the green flag in Sunday’s GEICO 500 (2 p.m. ET, ESPN).

“The (Chase) format is definitely creating a lot of drama, a lot of intensity, a lot of pressure, and each round seems to intensify that much more,” Gordon said in the aftermath of the Bank of America 500.

There will be drivers “that really have to win … that race and they have to maybe get a top five or make up a lot of points. Certainly these last two weeks have shaken things up quite a bit.

“I like our chances. I think we’ve got an excellent race team and I really hope we can make it through Talladega because I think the next round suits us very, very well.”

Joey Logano, a winner at Kansas, and Harvick are locked into the Eliminator Round regardless of their results next weekend. With eight drivers advancing, that leaves six positions to be determined by points, or a victory at the 2.66-mile superspeedway.

Heading into Saturday’s race, Gordon was eighth in points, eight points ahead of teammate Kasey Kahne. He is now sixth in the standings, with the ninth-place driver (Matt Kenseth) 18 points behind. A finish of 16th or better would put Gordon into the next round, as would finishes of 17th (and at least one lap led) or 18th (and most laps led).

No one, he said, “wants to deal with Talladega.”

“Everybody would like to take the weekend off there if they could. Two guys in some ways get to and the rest of us are going to have to go race there.

“We’ve got a little bit of a cushion but not near enough to be comfortable by any means. We’ll go and race the way we normally do there, which is just try to be smart, try to stay out of the mess and then put ourselves in a good position to get a good finish, (and) hope it works out.”

At Charlotte, Gordon’s No. 24 Chevrolet was extremely competitive on the long green-flag runs. He led six times for a total of 74 laps.

A late round of green-flag pit stops allowed Harvick to extend his lead when Gordon found himself dealing with slower traffic as he exited pit road and returned to the track at Lap 311.

And while he had one final opportunity on a restart with two laps remaining, he was unable to get back around Harvick when the green flew for the final time.

“We just didn’t have some of the things that we needed to go a little bit better go our way,” he said.

Gordon leads all active drivers in wins at Talladega with six. Only four of the eligible Chase drivers – Ryan Newman, Joey Logano, Kasey Kahne and Carl Edwards – are winless on the series’ biggest track.

Given his position in the standings, there’s no opportunity to lie back and let things sort themselves out.

“We’re going to have to just go race Talladega, which isn’t a bad thing,” he said. “I don’t like leaving things up to chance, which happens a lot of times at Talladega, but at the same time if it’s meant to be … for us to move on to the next round, we’ll find out.

“If our team is good enough, if our cars are good enough, which I think we are, we’ll go through to the next round.”

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