Gordon has a rough day at favored track

Gordon’s quest for a fifth NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship suffered a moderate setback Sunday afternoon as a cut right-front tire sent his Hendrick Motorsports No. 24 Chevrolet into the Turn 1 wall while running sixth in the 292nd of 303 laps.

Gordon and New Hampshire have historically had a good relationship, with the four-time series champ collecting three wins and four Coors Light Pole Awards over the course of his career at the 1.058-mile track. This year, not so much. In July, Gordon was about to line up second for a green-white-checkered overtime finish before his car sputtered out of gas.

“This place just doesn’t like us this year for whatever reason,” Gordon said. “Both races this year we just had a lot of strange things happen to us. Today we were fighting hard like we have been all day long, putting a great car out there. It’s hard to get track position on the No. 22 (race winner Joey Logano) and the No. 4 (Kevin Harvick) and even the No. 2 (Brad Keselowski) there, but I mean, I was real happy with the car.

“I thought we had an awesome race car, but it doesn’t matter if you blow a right-front tire. I’m pretty sure we cut something. I felt it go down about three-quarters of the way down the front straightaway and there is just nothing you can do. Just go along for the ride and hope the damage isn’t too bad, which we were very fortunate to still end up on the lead lap, I guess.”

The outcome, on the heels of the second-place finish last weekend in the Chase opener at Chicagoland, moved Gordon from a promising second place in the standings to a slightly more treacherous seventh as the first round of postseason eliminations looms after next weekend’s race at Dover.

Gordon’s track record at the Monster Mile has plenty of career highlights as well — four wins and four poles — but similarly, his result there in June left a sour taste; he faded from fifth to 15th place with an ill-handling car on the 35-lap green-flag run to the finish.

While Sunday’s mishap hasn’t placed Gordon in a must-win situation, the emphasis on avoiding catastrophe is palpable. Gordon sits 21 points ahead of 13th-place Denny Hamlin in the Chase standings with only Dover remaining before the postseason field trims down to 12 drivers for the first three-race cut.

“Well, the problem is you just can’t have things like that happen,” Gordon said. We have a strong enough team. We went from being very comfortable going into next week’s race to now not being very comfortable. We just have to go and perform and try to make sure things like this don’t happen.”

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