Why are several drivers, especially Gordon, feeling sense of urgency?
Well, I just had gone over this last week, but now Sunday Martin Truex Jr. can take his name off the list of those drivers desperately searching for a win before the Chase for the Sprint Cup starts. So now we are down to 12 races left in what we call the NASCAR Sprint Cup regular season and there are still six spots available in the Chase.
I still maintain, despite the fact there are still so many races to go until the Chase starts, that those remaining spots will not be filled with six winning drivers. I think we'll probably be more in line, similar to last year, of having 12 or 13 drivers in the Chase based on winning a race and the remaining three or four spots filled by drivers high up in the points.
When you look at those drivers outside the top 16 right now, especially starting with Clint Bowyer in 17th, the performance just isn't very good. Every driver from 17th on back has no more than five top-10 finishes in our first 14 races this season. There's not even a driver back there with more than one top-five finish.
So the performance outside the top 16, which is the cutoff for the Chase, is lacking. Now granted, on any given Sunday someone back there can pull off a win and find themselves not only in Victory Lane but also in the Chase. Case in point, we saw it happen last year in July at Daytona with Aric Almirola and then again at Watkins Glen with AJ Allmendinger.
If you take a look at the remaining 12 races before the Chase starts, you'll find that 25 percent of them are wild-card races. We have two road-course races (Sonoma and Watkins Glen) as well as a restrictor-plate race (Daytona).
I look at those just outside the top 16 and there's really nothing to get excited about. I mentioned Clint, who is 17th, and they aren't even remotely running well. In 14 races this season he's only had three top-10 finishes. The reality is they can barely run in the top 20 right now. Luckily for him there are some good tracks for him coming up, and hopefully they can find whatever is lacking and get him in the Chase.
Probably the biggest name that's feeling the pressure has to be Jeff Gordon. This is his last year. He wants to go out as a winner, but unfortunately they are struggling. Jeff started fourth Sunday but the best he could muster at Pocono was a 14th-place finish. Sure, Jeff is in the top 16 right now, but he fell one spot to 10th in the points after Sunday's race. Adding insult to injury, he and crew chief Alan Gustafson had an angry exchange over the No. 24 team radio Sunday. It got so heated at one point during the eighth and final caution that spotter Eddie D'Hondt stepped in on the radio trying to cool things off.
Does Jeff have anything left to prove in his NASCAR Hall of Fame career? Absolutely not, because Jeff Gordon doesn't have anything to prove to anyone. So what else is there for that man to accomplish? Knowing Jeff the way we do, we all know he wants to at least win a race in his final year behind the wheel.
If you are looking at organizations as a whole that are feeling the pressure, then my pick is Richard Childress Racing. What really ratchets up their pressure is what we saw happen on Sunday with Martin Truex Jr. winning. Martin's Furniture Row Racing team has an alliance with RCR, yet the three RCR teams can't even run in the shadow of that No. 78 car right now.
Unfortunately rowing that same boat with RCR is Roush Fenway Racing, Chip Ganassi Racing and Michael Waltrip Racing. We are closing in on a year since a Roush Ford has won a race. It's been a year and a half since a Ganassi car took the checkered flag, and two years since a MWR car has won a race. So my point is there are a lot of winless streaks out there and they aren't always tied to just the drivers.
To boil it all down to just one driver who is feeling the most pressure right now, in my book it simply has to be Jeff Gordon since this is his final year behind the wheel.
