After rough start, are Gordon, No. 24 team ready to contend for title?
I think Jeff Gordon is getting ready to contend for a fifth championship. After such a poor start, we were trying to grade him on NASCAR Race Hub and I pretty much said, "NL. No luck."
That's what I saw. Not that he didn't have a fast race car, or that he and crew chief Alan Gustafson weren't communicating. He just seemed like he always found himself in a bad way. And when the bad luck continues, it's almost self-induced.
When you look at what happened to him at Martinsville, for instance, he could have gotten a win there but got caught speeding. When he was at Bristol the other day, the pit crew left a wheel loose and he had to fight his way back.
There's nothing wrong with Jeff Gordon.
There's nothing wrong with his final year. He's not being distracted. He's just been running into some things that he's contributed to, as well as some things the team has contributed to.
But they've got a fast race car, they're working well together in his final season, and I see a lot of tenacity right there in Jeff, but at the same time, I see a man that's well-controlled and in control of what's going on.
It would have been real easy for him to get frustrated at Bristol on that last restart. He could have gone in there and said, "OK, fine, I'm going to go down in there and I'm going to knock the No. 20 car up into the wall and then I'm just going to try and outrun him back to the start-finish line and try to win this thing."
But, no, he raced Matt Kenseth clean, he raced his teammate, Jimmie Johnson, clean and he wound up coming home third. Matt and all those guys better be thankful he didn't get that outside lane on the last restart, because I think that No. 24 car was going to be a little bit more of a handful than they were ready for.
Gustafson and the No. 24 team are doing a good job overall. They just need to tighten up the ship a little bit and Jeff needs to quit making a few mistakes along the way, and they'll be fine.
They could be fine enough this weekend to get their first win of the season at Richmond, but I'm really looking more toward Charlotte or Kansas, maybe, for these guys to go to Victory Lane.
I think that so far, I'm seeing more speed out of the Hendrick cars on the mile-and-a-half tracks than I'm seeing on the short tracks. So, I think they're going to be fine, and I think Jeff's going to be real proud of his final season when it's all said and done.
