WRAL Sports Fan

NASCAR

Winless season doesn't sit well with Jeff Gordon

By SceneDaily.com

Jan 2, 2009

Charlotte, N.C. — It was the end of a remarkable streak, but Jeff Gordon says his failure to win a NASCAR Sprint Cup race in 2008 isn’t following him around like a menacing ghost.

“I’m pretty good at putting things behind me,” the four-time Cup champ says. “Even if you win, you put that behind you. You can’t really hold on to things very long in this sport because things change so fast and it’s so competitive and you’re on to the next thing, whether it be a test or being focused on another area of the car. I’m looking forward to next year, and I feel we’re going to be very competitive.

“It’s not because I carry a lot of momentum or some great race wins out of 2008. It’s because I know what we’re capable of. We didn’t pull it out in 2008, and we’re going to put that behind us and move on.”

Gordon’s winless season was his first since 1993, which was his first full-time year in Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolets. Since then, he had won at least two races per year – and 81 in all. The 2008 season brought an end to that run.

“It does bother me,” Gordon says. “I’m certainly not happy that we didn’t win races. But that’s going to be our motivation to make ourselves better next season, to win races and race for the championship. Those are the facts. We didn’t get it done this year. We’re going to do everything we can to rebound and come back in 2009 and be strong.”

Despite his failure to win a race, Gordon qualified again for the Chase For The Sprint Cup and finished seventh in points, marking the 15th straight season he has been no lower than 11th in the final standings. He had 19 top-10 finishes.

“I think the highlight of the year was how we closed out the season,” Gordon says. “If you take away the engine problem we had in Phoenix [in the next-to-last race], we had a strong last five or six races. I think we turned around our mile-and-a-half program. We had some things to be very proud of that are going to make us strong next season.”

The Hendrick Motorsports team boosted its engineering presence at race sites late in the season and might be looking at other changes approaching 2009, Gordon says. He again endorses the job that crew chief Steve Letarte is doing, however.

“We need a few changes,” Gordon says. “We can be better. We had some really strong efforts throughout the Chase, but I think we should have finished fourth or fifth in points. I think we came out of the season with momentum.

“We tried some things at the end of the season, beefing up our engineering staff at the track. I think that’s a positive thing for us. We’re going to focus on that even more next year. Sometime you need to get beat down before you can pick yourself back up and be stronger. I think the season made us stronger. I think it made us better.”