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100 for Hendrick Gordon's 55th win gives team owner landmark victory
Updated: Monday August 20, 2001 1:24 AM
By Stephen Thomas, CNNSI.com BROOKLYN, Mich. -- You can gauge Jeff Gordon's success rate by the boos -- the more you hear, the better he's doing. And after Sunday's Kmart 400 at Michigan International Speedway, Gordon was fairly bathed in them. For the second consecutive week, Gordon was far and away the class of the 43-car field, making a mockery of things and leading 143 of 200 laps en route to his 55th career win and the 100th of team owner Rick Hendrick's career. Hendrick, whose father, Joe, is undergoing heart surgery Monday, was not there to witness the win. Hendrick joins Petty Enterprises (271) and Junior Johnson (139) as the only team owners to have at least 100 wins. As a result of his ninth top-5 finish of the season and his third win, Gordon is now leading Dale Jarrett, who finished 18th, by 26 points in the race for the Winston Cup championship.
"About the only thing that has taken away from this win right now is that we couldn't have Rick here and Pop here," Gordon said. "But that's what makes Rick such a special person, his family comes first." Despite Gordon's statistical dominance, he was actually quite fortunate that he came first Sunday and that neither Ricky Rudd nor Sterling Marlin, the second and third-place finishers, stole his win. When Dale Earnhardt Jr. blew his engine on lap 172, bringing out the sixth caution of the day, Gordon, Rudd and Marlin entered the pits first, second and third, respectively. When the race went green again on lap 176, Marlin was first … and Gordon and Rudd were 10th and 11th, each the victim of poor pit stops. And while both Gordon and Rudd had maneuvered themselves back to second and third by lap 188, Marlin had a commanding lead -- until Robert Pressley and John Andretti spun in turn 2, bringing another caution and bunching the field.
"Sterling definitely would have won this race had that [second-to-last] caution not come out," Rudd said. "You'd be sitting here talking about Sterling's win." Gordon got an excellent jump on the re-start on lap 193 and took the lead. "We just went into the corner on the restart and the car didn't stick," Marlin said. "All day long, it took about two or three laps on the restarts to get going." As it was, the race was yet to deliver the defining moment of what had been a dull-but-typical, superspeedway afternoon. When Shawna Robinson, making her first Winston Cup start, brought out the eighth and final caution of the day on lap 195, it gave Rudd one final, four-lap shot at Gordon, who again was pulling away from the field. Though Gordon held the lead for almost three of those laps, as the two entered the front stretch to take the white flag, Rudd ducked underneath and took the lead. As the two headed into the first turn, Gordon recovered and had pulled alongside Rudd. Then, in the blink of an eye, Gordon simply blew by Rudd on the outside between turns 1 and 2, taking the lead for good.
"I knew if I got the lead I'd have the preferred line," Gordon said. "But he made a smart move, went on the high side of me down in three and four and got a run. He got inside me and I thought I was done. I never drove so hard into turn one as I did on that last lap. [His car] went sideways, he checked up and I just jumped back into it and it just stuck." "In hindsight, I probably should have [made my move] coming to the checkered flag, not the white-flag lap," Rudd said. "I got momentum on him, but we went into turn 1 and I couldn't get my car to turn. It was like it was on ice; had I kept the momentum going, I'd have slid both of us up into the guardrail." Rudd, the consummate pro, didn't and the result was Gordon's win … followed by the boos. Expect them to grow louder in the coming weeks.
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