By blowing a cylinder head and most of a 111-point lead in one race, Jeff Gordon turned the Winston Cup finish into a real dogfight by Bruce Newman If auto racing doesn't work out for Jeff Gordon, maybe he could play for the Boston Red Sox: His average finish in races held in the month of October is 17th. (Margin of victory: 3.84 seconds) Terry Labonte, Chevrolet, 334 laps at 143.143 mph Mark Martin, Ford, 334 laps Dale Jarrett, Ford, 334 laps Sterling Marlin, Chevrolet, 334 laps Ricky Craven, Chevrolet, 334 laps 3 hours, 30 minutes, 0 seconds; 5 flags, 37 laps run under caution Bobby Labonte 184.068 mph with point totals (and points earned this weekend) 1 Jeff Gordon 4,163 (75) 2 Terry Labonte 4,162 (185) 3 Dale Jarrett 4,071 (165) 4 Dale Earnhardt 3,892 (155) 5 Mark Martin 3,801 (175) Jeff Gordon entered the UAW-GM Quality 500 with what was beginning to look like an insurmountable 111-point lead over Hendrick Motorsports teammate Terry Labonte. Gordon had won three of the previous five races and finished second in the other two. It was the sort of domination that in a different time or a different sport might have invited comparisons to athletes like Wayne Gretzky or Michael Jordan. But Winston Cup racing has a way of humbling its front-runners and bringing them back to the pack, as Gordon learned after suffering a cracked cylinder head on Lap 177 of the 334-lap race at Charlotte Motor Speedway. On the wacky abacus that calculates the drivers' point standings in the big leagues of stock car racing, it's not so much how you win but how you lose that matters. On a black day at Charlotte, Gordon finished in 31st place, and lost big. Labonte, who had finished second six times this season—twice to Gordon—was the big beneficiary of Gordon's troubles. As Labonte tried to explain it, "It's awful hard to gain 110 points, but it's not that hard to lose them." It actually could have been a lot worse for Gordon. Had he not been able to nurse his engine along with frequent pit stops for water with which to cool it, he probably would have finished about 10 positions farther back and would have lost the points lead entirely. As it was, he finished the day clinging to a one-point lead, and the last three races of the season were starting to look like single-elimination playoff games, with the losers facing a long off-season (if the Winston Cup's three-month hiatus can be called an off-season). "Now we are going to find out what we're made of," an understandably disappointed Gordon said after the race. "The pressure is on the leader." Yes, but it was getting harder and harder to tell exactly who he meant. Rivals Gordon and Labonte stood just a point apart. photograph by Sam Sharpe