Struggles Continue for Gordon

[Schwartz Fan]

Struggles Continue for Gordon



Jeff Gordon hoped to snap his winless season with a trip to victory lane at Watkins Glen International on Sunday but it turned out to be a disappointing day for the DuPont Chevrolet team.

An early radio problem resulted in NASCAR signaling a black flag to get Gordon's attention, the driver of the No. 24 Chevrolet was never able to get back into contention for a record-setting fifth career Watkins Glen win.

Toss in an ill-handling car and Sunday was a day Gordon would just as soon forget.

"We just struggled today," Gordon said. "We really missed the set-up. There wasn't much we could do about it other than just fight."

The problem with the radio got the day off on a wrong foot early.

"Yeah, we lost probably about 15 seconds on that; probably 20 (seconds) total because there were guys coming in to pit earlier and we needed to pit," Gordon said. "(Crew chief) Steve (Letarte) was trying to tell me to pit and I had no idea. We just had a loose connection and finally they black-flagged me. But even while I was out there I was trying to fix it and I lost even more time doing that. And so we finally got in there and shoot, we came out and we were like 30th, you know. The car was a struggle already and the last thing we needed was to lose that much track position."

Losing communication with his crew made for a tough beginning to Gordon's race.

"Oh, it's miserable," he said. "It's about as frustrating as you can get as a team, as a driver. It's not any one person's fault. We're all in it together. We have some work to do. You know we had this same issue at the beginning of the Sonoma race, but we got some cautions to work on it. We didn't have the cautions to work on it early enough here and it bit us."

One bright spot for Gordon was that he missed the big accident that red-flagged the race with nine laps to go.

"I was right behind it," Gordon said. "I barely missed it. I made a pretty good move getting into (Turn) 1 and got by three or four guys. I came around and saw McDowell and the No. 38 I guess got together and when he hit the wall, I was just trying to pull right and stay away from it and just barely missed him. I looked in my mirror and just saw guys plowing into it and I knew it was bad."

Despite the 29th-place finish Gordon was able to mainatain the sixth spot in the Sprint Cup Series standings.

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[Raven]

I feel so bad for Jeff. I have so much respect for him, I hope they get it figured out, whatever it is. I sure don't feel it is Jeff, I know he's much better than we've been seeing.

[24girl]

I keep telling myself it will be ok....this is not his season tho.Muligans and mistakes plus the fact that toyota knows something they dont...but what I dont understand is why they did so well last season with the COT yet this yr. kinda sucks!
Lots of drivers would love to be having as good a season as he is tho,I find comfort in that,lol,did that make sense?
Oh well,gotta take the bad with the good.....

[Raven]

So true! Biffle and others aren't where Jeff is in the points.