Results tagged “Jeff Gordon” from Haddock in the Paddock

Jeff Gordon has not won a NASCAR Spint Cup Series race in 2008. The Hendrick Motorsports drivers have combined to win three Cup races this year. This from a team that won half, 18, of the Cup races last year.
He has won four Cup races at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana in his career, but his last came in 2004. Gordon's last win in any Cup race came on Oct. 13 at Lowe's Motor Speedway in North Carolina.
"It's been a little bit frustrating and disappointing," Gordon said. "We want to win. We want to be competitive. We came off such a great year last year. Our team has been phenomenal this year, we just haven't had the runs, haven't had the cars and when we did have the cars haven't been able to put it all together. So that's definitely been frustrating."
He's one of five drivers in Chase contention without a win. Gordon is ninth in the Sprint Cup Series standings with nine top-five finishes. Gordon said it's more important to put up consistent finishes than win races.
"A victory all that does is calm the media down," Gordon said. "That's all that does. A win is just to try to keep our streak going and those type of things. To me it's not about a win, it's about consistently running up front, leading laps. This is a perfect example, this race track. When we lead a lap here we're usually in the top-five. That's fairly typical for us so it's about being competitive enough to get up there and lead laps. When we lead laps we do very well."
Gordon qualified third for Sunday's Pepsi 500.

Jeff Gordon looks like he will fall short of winning his fifth Cup championship. He is 86 points behind Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jimmie Johnson with one race to go, this weekend at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Gordon was asked by reporters at Homestead how the late Dale Earnhardt would approach the last race of the year if he was trailing Johnson by 86 points in the NASCAR Chase for the Nextel Cup standings.
Gordon said Earnhardt would probably take the same approach Ron Hornaday Jr. will take against Mike Skinner in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series.
Hornaday is 29 points behind Skinner in the Truck Series standings. It's not as much of a deficit as Gordon's, but still a challenge to make up that many points in one race.
Gordon said he thinks about how Earnhardt would react to the Chase and the new points system NASCAR has implemented recently.
"How would Dale be influencing things happening in this sport today, how would he run on the track, how would he compete against some of the drivers that are out there today," said Gordon, driver of the No. 24 Chevrolet for Hendrick Motorsports. "The only real time I ever battled him for the championship was in '95 and while he taught me some lessons in '93, '94 by putting the bumper to me several times, in '95 that rarely ever happened in competition."
Gordon said he learned how to race Earnhardt, mainly knowing when to challenge him and when to stay out of his way.
"You knew he was going to lean on you and you had to be ready for that," Gordon said. "I can't think of a time when we were battling for a championship that he just intently did anything dirty. He might have raced hard but that's about it."
But that doesn't necessarily mean Gordon will use some of the tactics Earnhardt used on him. Earnhardt might have been known as the Intimidator, but Gordon said there are other ways than driving aggressively to intimidate.
"I've always said the most intimidating thing is a guy in your mirror that's running you down," Gordon said. "You don't have to drive a black car and rough guys up to do that. I think the style and the competitiveness, I think the microscope that we're under has changed that quite a bit over the years and the way NASCAR handles things, you can't do some of the things that you used to be able to do. I don't even know if Dale would be able to get away with some of those things today."