Around Iredell Sports

2007 Oct-09

Gordon, Johnson smarter than rivals

By Mike Mulhern
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TALLADEGA, Ala. - Jeff Gordon and teammate Jimmie Johnson once again outsmarted their rivals, this time with some excellent late-race tactics, to roll one-two across the finish line in Sunday’s UAW-Ford 500 and add to their advantage in NASCAR’s Nextel Cup Chase.

Barring a collapse, Gordon and Johnson continue on target in their title chase, with only Clint Bowyer hanging within sight of the tour leaders. This has been a Gordon-Johnson season right from the start, and unless some of their struggling challengers catch fire, the drama of this Chase is about gone.

“You can call it whatever you want - good fortune, whatever - we definitely had some good things go our way,” Gordon said. “You have to have that to win a championship. We have that right now, and hope we can keep that going.

“But we also have to perform. We did that. We did it at the end of the race last week. We have done it everywhere except Dover.”

For most of the sunny afternoon at Talladega Superspeedway, Gordon and Johnson hung at the very back of the pack, content to run 37th or so, until the final minutes. They said that that strategy had to do with the car of tomorrow, which Gordon says needs a lot more testing.

Steve Letarte, Gordon’s crew chief, said that’s because “we didn’t know what the race was going to be like. There were a lot of predictions, but nobody really knew.

“The other thing is that with this new car, the draft creates such a huge vacuum you can safely hang back and not lose the pack. With the old car, if you made one mistake your day was kind of over.
“And then there’s the chase. It’s only 10 races. So it worked out.”

An errant air hose on a late pit stop with 125 miles to go cost Gordon a pass-through penalty by NASCAR, which nearly cost him a lap to the field.

“I hate to make mistakes, I hate when our crew makes mistakes, and they hate it,” Letarte said. “We need to clean those mistakes up. We got lucky with the yellow. But we can’t have mistakes like that in the Chase and expect to be lucky every week.

“Something as small as that can change your weekend.”

Hendrick’s engine men also played it conservatively, running the old SB2 model engine instead of the newer R07, and Gordon and Johnson didn’t have the engine problems that hit the Richard Childress-Dale Earnhardt Inc. teams.

“We had concern with the package,” Letarte said. “I don’t think we’ve ever run it here. But we had great power all day, and great reliability.”

Analyzing the new car was a bit like watching blind men describing an elephant. Everyone had a different take.

“It has just so much downforce,” Letarte said. “It’s the same car we would race at Charlotte or Martinsville, and that obviously has a great deal more downforce than any car we would have brought here in the past.”

But how to handle that was the question, and Gordon and Johnson and Jack Roush’s Ford drivers hung near the back and let the Dodge and Toyota teams work out some of the kinks.

“The Roush cars put a hint out about what they were going to do in last practice,” Letarte said. “We saw them line up and see how fast they could draft. We figured we could run with those guys, too ... though I don’t know if they wanted us with them or not. But it worked out good.”

“It was the hardest race to be in that type of mindset,” Gordon said. “I’ve never had to do that before - where you’re back there in the back just riding along half-throttle.

“I told Rick some guys were talking about that strategy, and I said ‘I can’t do it.’ I want to be battling for the lead.

“I knew we could get up there (late in the race), I just didn’t know how far up there we could get. But the cautions fell right for us at the end. And it was a great run with our teammates (Casey Mears helped push, too) to get up there.

“I really thought Jimmie was going to win. I was riding second and wasn’t getting the momentum I felt I needed to make a pass on him. But everything shuffled coming to the white flag.

“I love when you can battle with 10 to go and it’s wild and crazy like that,” Gordon said. “I don’t like doing it for 500 miles, but I like doing it with 10 to go.

+ + +

It wasn’t the first Gordon- Johnson duel for the win this season - at Martinsville, Johnson got the win. And it probably won’t be the last.

“The biggest thing is the misconception there are two separate teams,” Letarte said. “There are only two people in our shop that wear one sponsor, and that’s Chad (Knaus, Johnson’s crew chief) and me. The other 85 all wear Lowe’s and DuPont on their shirts and they work on both cars.

“The gentleman that jacks our car (Sundays) builds the brakes for Chad. His gasman builds the brakes for our car. They are so intermingled I wouldn’t even know where to draw a line to have competition.

“Make no mistake - when they drop the green, we’re here to win. But the 85 people we have are extremely mature; they’ve taken a very difficult situation and made it a very successful situation.”

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