Six years have passed since Jeff Gordon won his fourth and last NASCAR Cup championship - it was still the Winston Cup back in those days.
In that time, Tony Stewart (twice), Matt Kenseth, Kurt Busch and Jimmie Johnson have won the Cup title establishing themselves as distant pretenders to the throne vacated by the late Dale Earnhardt when he died at
Daytona in February of ‘01.
Gordon went on to win six races that year and take his fourth championship in seven years. Since then Gordon has won twenty-four more Cup races but was a championship contender only in 2004, the first year of NASCAR’s Chase for the Cup.
This year however, he and Hendrick team-mate Jimmie Johnson have been the men to beat, both of them running at the top of the points throughout the season. Between them, they’ve won twelve of the first thirty-one races and backed up those wins with tremendously consistent top five and top ten finishes. Gordon has finished in the top five nineteen times and has made the top ten in twenty-five races. Johnson has sixteen top five results and nineteen top tens. The only other drivers’ to come close to equalling Gordon and Johnson’s records of consistency this season have been Joe Gibbs team-mates Tony Stewart and Denny Hamlin, and to a lesser degree Matt Kenseth with Roush-Fenway, but nobody has run at the front this year more than Gordon and Johnson.
Here too, is a complete contrast to what we so often see in
Formula 1 with a pair of team-mates who are close friends, equally respectful of each other on and off the track.
Gordon is a part owner of Johnson’s car, of course, and was an advocate of Johnson joining Hendrick back in 2001. You would think the likes of Ron Dennis would learn that this is the way to achieve maximum results, not the silly and unproductive
F1 method of pitting driver against driver.
![Jeff Gordon - DuPont Chevrolet [pic credit: image.net]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/303466.jpg)
