Gordon: Win in finale would be bittersweet

Gordon began the season-ending weekend on the right foot, winning the 200th Coors Light Pole Award for Hendrick Motorsports in Friday's qualifying. The achievement lifted the spirits of both driver and team, giving Gordon a prime starting perch for Sunday's Ford EcoBoost 400 finale (3 p.m. ET, ESPN).

Gordon said he was in "disbelief for a good 24 hours" after the season's penultimate race last weekend at Phoenix, when Ryan Newman's brash move to overtake rookie Kyle Larson in the final turn made the crucial one-point difference.

"You know, I think even if we win this race on Sunday, that's only going to make it hurt a little bit more in some ways because we could have won the championship if we were here," Gordon said. "I think it's not that I'm over it yet, but I've definitely ‑‑ getting to the race track, it allows all of us to focus on what we do best, which is go and compete, and when you're fine‑tuning the setup of the car and making laps, especially at this place, right up an inch off the wall every lap, that takes your mind off of it. That part has been nice, and this is certainly a great achievement for us to start the weekend and something that's positive that we can smile about and be proud of."

Despite a stellar campaign where he claimed four victories and led the points standings through the heart of the season and in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup playoffs, Gordon was ousted following the Eliminator Round, despite a pair of runner-up finishes in the three-race segment. His downfall wound up being the 29th-place run at Texas Motor Speedway, when late-race contact with Brad Keselowski triggered a spinout and dramatic loss of track position.

NASCAR chairman Brian France said that the chances of modifying the Chase format after its inaugural season were "very modest, modest to zero," but that minor alterations were possible. That opened the door for Gordon to propose a separate points structure among the Chase drivers that could potentially minimize the impact of a subpar finish behind non-Chasers.

"I think it's a good system, number one. I like how important it is to win, how that moves you from one round to the next," Gordon said. "I would say that the one thing that I thought about ‑‑ and this would not have moved me to the final round, but I think it's the right thing to do ‑‑ and that's you have a separate points system just for the 16 and then for the 8 ‑‑ or the 12 and then the 8. I just think there's so many factors with all the other competitors out there that you should be racing those guys. You should be racing them in points, not necessarily racing them and all the other competitors out there. I think you've earned that right.

"So I would like to see a few of the highest finishing, then you get 16, 15, 14, 13, but it doesn't matter if you finish 25th. And that just allows you to kind of throw out one of those bad races. I think you've still got to be consistent, winning is still going to get you through, but it allows you to race those guys, not necessarily go race everybody else."

Though any potential tweaks come too late to save Gordon -- despite title contender Kevin Harvick's jokes that he was half-expecting to see him added as a fifth championship driver -- he still has hopes of playing spoiler again in a race he won in 2012. While Gordon would've welcomed another round of Chase stressors for the chance at a fifth crown, he's instead hoping to bask in a victory celebration that carries well into wintertime.

While he said winning would carry a sour taste with thoughts of what could have been, the only worse alternative would be falling flat in Sunday's finale.

"While we wish we had stress on us, there's just a lot less stress, and so we can just go focus on competing and competing at a high level," Gordon said. "But I can tell you, if we come out here with a bad finish, it's going to sting. It's going to hurt. That's not the way you want to go into the offseason. With everything that's happened for us the last couple weeks, we need to have something really good to carry into this offseason to think about for next year."

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