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Inside Motor Sports
Posted: Tuesday September 03, 2002 1:41 PM
Fixin' to Roll
Its confidence restored, Jeff Gordon's crew is aiming the 24 juggernaut at the points title By
Mark Bechtel 
As Jeff Gordon emerged from his car in Victory Lane on Sunday at Darlington Raceway, he surveyed his raucous crew and proclaimed, "These guys have come alive." Gordon's second straight win, on the heels of a 31-race winless streak, couldn't have come at a better time. There are three factors in the racing equation: the driver, the car and luck. No one on Gordon's team thought he had forgotten which pedal was the accelerator and which the brake, and you can write off only so many eighth-place finishes to bad luck. That left the car -- and crew -- as the culprits. "You start questioning yourself," says Jay Wiles, Gordon's engine tuner. "If you've got Jeff Gordon driving your car and you're not getting it done, you know it's not his fault."
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Gordon's cool kept the wheels from coming off his team. Jamie Squire/Getty Images |
The one person who kept the 24 team from getting too far down on itself was Gordon, who exudes a calm that can be contagious. That composure, says crew chief Robbie Loomis, is what he cites when rival drivers ask what separates Gordon from them. "He's the one who kept us calm," says Loomis. "He's got confidence that runs way deep, and I and a lot of guys on the team don't have that."
That Gordon is in the hunt for his fifth Winston Cup title -- he's 91 points behind leader Sterling Marlin after winning his fifth Southern 500 -- is a testament to his scrappiness. Gordon has fared poorly this year at tracks that were once points mines. For instance, he won six of eight road-course races from 1998 to 2001, yet this year he was 37th at Sonoma and 22nd at Watkins Glen. By contrast, when he broke his winless streak two weeks ago, he did so in one of the few events he hadn't won, the Bristol night race.
The points race might come down to the season's final day, which hasn't happened since 1997. Betting against Gordon in that scenario is a bad idea. "He's always the man to beat," says Bill Elliott. "Jeff's coming up on a good stretch, and that team is really strong. If they don't have bad luck, they'll be hard to beat."
Issue date: September 9, 2002
For more Inside Motor Sports see this week's issue of Sports Illustrated, on newsstands Wednesday, September 4. Click here to subscribe to SI.
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