Martinsville Notebook
Notebook Items:
• Runner-Up Is A Mixed Blessing For Gordon
• Hamlin Not Happy With Eighth
• Frustrating Night For Edwards
Oct. 26, 2014
Runner-up finish is a mixed blessing for Jeff Gordon
By Reid Spencer
NASCAR Wire Service
MARTINSVILLE,
Va.—Finishing second to Hendrick Motorsports teammate Dale Earnhardt
Jr. wasn’t without substantial benefits to Jeff Gordon.
When
Gordon crossed the finish line .344 seconds behind Earnhardt in the
Goody’s Headache Relief Shot 500 at Martinsville Speedway on Sunday, he
did so as the new leader in
the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup.
With
Earnhardt, a non-Chase driver, winning the first race of the Chase’s
Eliminator Round, Gordon goes to Texas and Phoenix two solid finishes
away from advancing to the championship
race at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
But
Gordon narrowly missed the major prize, a victory that would have locked
him into the season finale ahead of a test session at Homestead.
In one
respect, Gordon can blame himself for the second-place finish. He had to
fight back from a pit road speeding penalty that dropped him to the
rear of the field for a
restart on Lap 206 of 500.
“Yeah,
unfortunately I lost this race today because of my mistake on pit road,”
Gordon said. “That was on me. We played catch-up for the rest of the
day.”
Gordon
was shuffled back on the next-to-last restart with 64 laps left. He came
to the flag in second position, to the outside of race leader Clint
Bowyer, with Earnhardt in
third. Stuck in the outside lane after Earnhardt filled the hole
beneath him, Gordon slipped to fifth before he could get back in line on
the bottom.
Did Gordon expect Earnhardt to leave him room to get into line at that point?
“I was
hoping,” Gordon said. “I mean, he let me in on one other one (an earlier
restart). I think the next time I was third, and he never even tried to
move down, so I filled
the gap. It’s something we’re going to talk about a little bit, because
I have a feeling that what happened was, when I didn’t let him in, he
felt like, ‘I’m not going to let him in again.’
“I
don’t really know. But I’m not upset about it. You don’t expect anybody
to do anything. You hope—yeah, sure, you hope. I mean, I hoped Tony
Stewart was going to let me in,
too, one time. We about crashed going down into Turn 3. That’s racing.
That’s just part of it.”
HAMLIN DISAPPOINTED WITH EIGHTH-PLACE RUN
Throughout
Sunday’s race at Martinsville, Denny Hamlin ran consistently in the top
five, led 68 laps and had a car capable of contending for the win.
But
Hamlin’s day soured initially with a slow pit stop on Lap 420, when he
entered pit road from the lead and came out fourth. When three cars
stayed out on old tires and took
the green flag with five laps left, Hamlin lost more positions and
eventually came home eighth.
That
left the driver of the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota fifth in the
standings, seven points behind leader Jeff Gordon. But fifth won’t be
good enough when the Chase for
the NASCAR Sprint Cup field is cut from eight drivers to four two weeks
hence at Phoenix.
“It's
hard, because you've got guys that go laps down in the course of the
race and get enough lucky dogs and then 50 laps on their tires, and they
want to stay out,” Hamlin
fumed. “Just bottlenecks the field up and we all got the short end of
last restart stick again. Just sucked at the end, and we can't finish
where we're running.
“We're
running better than what we're finishing. Other guys, like (Ryan) Newman
(third Sunday) are finishing better than they're running. That's part
of the deal. You've got
to do it for all 500 laps, and we just didn't have a very good car once
the track went shaded there, and we came in first and came out fourth
on a slow stop. I couldn't recover from that.”
FRUSTRATING NIGHT FOR EDWARDS
Carl Edwards started 11th in the Goody’s 500. Only one problem—that was the highlight of his day at Martinsville.
Edwards’
No. 99 Roush Fenway Racing Ford lost ground throughout the race, fell a
lap down at one point but, with a free pass as the highest-scored
lapped car, eventually finished
20th.
Now
sixth in the standings, 20 points behind leader Jeff Gordon, Edwards has
but one objective in the last two races of the Chase’s Eliminator
Round.
“We’ll go to Texas and go for the win,” Edwards said. “We’ll go to Phoenix and go for the win there, and that’s all we can do.”
Edwards,
however, has been strong in recent races at intermediate speedways, and
he has three victories at Texas Motor Speedway, the next venue on the
schedule.
“We ran
fifth at Kansas and eighth at Charlotte,” he said. “We’ve got a bunch
of wins at Texas (three), so there’s nothing saying we can’t go there
and do it.
“We’ve got a test coming up this week, and we’ll keep digging. These guys don’t quit.”
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