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CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Jeff Gordon is proud of what his team has accomplished this year, even though among those accomplishments is a string of 32 races without a win.
Not exactly the type of thing you want to tout heading into the final four races of NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series season.
Fortunately for the 44-year-old, coming soon to a NASCAR on FOX TV booth near you, that lack of success didn’t keep him out of this year’s Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup, and it didn’t keep him from advancing through two three-race elimination rounds.
Survive the next round and the Hendrick Motorsports driver will find himself going for a fifth title, his first under the current Chase format, and the opportunity to literally go out on top.
But that’s down the road, something Gordon will talk about but doesn’t dwell on in the here and now. Sunday’s Goody’s Headache Relief Shot 500 currently has the attention of the driver and his No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports team.
“Obviously we’re focused on Martinsville right now being the next race,” Gordon said Tuesday, arriving at the NASCAR Hall of Fame fresh out of a sit-down with crew chief Alan Gustafson and his band of engineers.
The talk on the HMS campus was of the team’s recent efforts, what’s working and what isn’t, as well as how the last outing at the .526-mile track went earlier in the spring (he led 21 laps and finished ninth). An eight-time winner at Martinsville, Gordon saw a potential victory slip from his grasp when he was penalized for speeding on pit road, a violation that took him from the front of the field (he had led the previous 20 laps) to the end of the longest line.
“We qualified pretty well there, but that number one pit stall is so huge and we want that thing bad,” Gordon said of Martinsville.
“At the end of that race, other than having the issue on pit road where I was trying to jump into my box, got caught speeding, trying to execute that a little bit better, but also get ourselves in a position at the end, I think we have a shot at winning this race.”
Winning races hasn’t been an issue for Gordon for much of his career. He has more victories (92) than any other active driver and more than all but two of the inactive ones (Richard Petty, 200; David Pearson, 105). Yet it’s been more than a year since his last win. The last time he went 0-for-the season was 2010.
Making this year’s Chase wasn’t a problem — his team was consistent enough to finish among the top 16. Advancing was a tougher nut to crack, especially the most recent round that included Charlotte, Kansas and the daunting Talladega.
“This past round was the one I was most nervous about,” he admitted. “Two mile-and-a-half tracks that have rock-hard tires. That does not suit me. I want a tire that falls off, that wears out, that slips and slides around. That was not Kansas or Charlotte.
“Then Talladega, I mean, I can’t remember the last time I finished a race at Talladega with a car in one piece, or a restrictor plate track for that matter.
“So, yeah, I didn’t have a tremendous amount of confidence. But I had a lot of confidence in our team, what we were capable of in the way that we’ve been going about it. I keep saying ‘grinding it out.’ If you analyzed the races the way we analyze our races, you have no idea how much we’ve had to fight for those finishes.”
There’s still time, he said, for additional trophies and a shot at the title. Martinsville, where he last won in 2013, Texas (where he has 13 top 10s) and Phoenix (three straight top-10 runs including a runner-up last fall) stand between Gordon and a ticket to Homestead.
If others don’t see he and his team as a threat, that’s OK. Gordon understands how such assumptions can be made.
“We have not shown the strength that other teams have that are still in (the Chase),” he said. “We’ve not been the dominant cars and team.
I hope after this round that changes. … But up to this point we’re definitely the underdog.”
Perhaps, but Martinsville begins another round and another set of opportunities.
“One thing that we’ve done so well that I think will continue no matter what, because it’s just this team, is we never stop fighting and grinding,” he said. “That’s what we’ve had to do. Now we’re just in that mode. … We seem to really do a great job being consistent and getting the best finish. That’s what we’ve been certainly doing in the Chase.
“If we do that for three more weeks,” he said, “I think we make it to Homestead.”