Tuesday, August 13, 2002
Gordon searches for answers to 0-30
By Chris Jenkins
USA TODAY
OK, this is getting out of hand. Jeff Gordon's winless streak stands at 30 races after a deflating weekend for the No. 24 team at Watkins Glen (N.Y.) International Raceway.
Gordon finished 22nd on Sunday at a track where he had won four of the last five races.
“Everybody has their day in the sun, and it hasn't been our day for a while,” crew chief Robbie Loomis said. “You just have to get yourself together and come back and do it again. I mean, we can stomp, kick, throw things, cuss at everybody and all that, but that's not going to accomplish anything.”
As always, Gordon handled the disappointing finish with dignity after the race, emerging from his team's transporter truck to answer several variations of the same question: What's wrong?
“He's a champion; he knows how to handle it,” Loomis said. “At the same time, he's very disappointed at the outcome of the race. He wants to win. He wants to win bad.”
Gordon's problems began Friday, when he qualified a disappointing 23rd. The team tried a radically different suspension set-up during Saturday's first practice session, and it didn't work; he ranked a staggering 41st on the time sheet. They went back to their original set-up for the second practice session and were much faster, but the practice and qualifying problems set them back.
“I tell people all the time, when we were winning last year, having good practices and qualifying good, every time you do that your confidence keeps elevating and you keep working from a higher level,” Loomis said. “This year what we've been experiencing, we've just been operating. We've never got anything to really give us the momentum to go.”
Gordon quickly worked his way into the top 10 Sunday. But his Chevrolet developed handling problems midway through the race, and the team wasn't able to solve them by making suspension adjustments during pit stops.
Loomis said that has been a problem all season: “We just have not been on top of our game at tuning the car during the race. I said the first half of (Sunday's) race we had a great racecar. The second half I made some adjustments, almost took it out of the ballpark. ... It's real unfortunate because every time someone slips we can't seem to capitalize.”
Points leader Sterling Marlin had an even worse weekend, starting at the back of the pack after NASCAR penalized the team for an engine change. Marlin had more engine problems during the race and finished 30th. But Gordon wasn't able to capitalize, slipping one spot to fifth in the Winston Cup points standings. Gordon is only 106 points behind Marlin, but doesn't take any consolation from that.
“That's the least of my worries right now,” Gordon said.
“I want to win races, and I want to go to places that I know we can win races and perform to where we're capable of. Last week at Indy we had one of the best efforts we had all year. We had a great effort this weekend; it just didn't work for us.”
Loomis said: “You get the points, and you look at them and you think each week, like, (the) big picture looks OK, but that's not really what we want. So we've got to just keep working until it's right.”
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Gordon searches for answers to 0-30
