NASCAR NEXTEL Cup series leader Jeff Gordon may have seen his points advantage whittled right down following a lowly seventh place finish at Atlanta Motor Speedway last weekend, but the DuPont Chevrolet ace is insisting 'it ain't over 'til it's over'.
The four-time Winston Cup king's pain was increased by witnessing Hendrick Motorsports team-mate and chief rival Jimmie Johnson triumph in the Pep Boys Auto 500 – the reigning champion's second straight victory coming directly on the back of his success at Martinsville Speedway a week earlier.
“I'm just happy to have a points lead now after the day we had,” Gordon confessed afterwards. “I think we dodged a bullet. We thought we were going to come out of here with a little bit better finish than this, but you have to take the positives that you can out of the fact we minimised [the potential damage] at the end.
“Every weekend you know you've got to fight hard every single lap, for every position, and I am a little disappointed. We just over-adjusted and got ourselves loose, and of course that's the one time it was the long green flag run, so it was everything I could do to try to keep it out of the wall.
“We finally got it tightened up towards the end and we were coming to the front, [but] I was concerned whether the tyres were going to make it because I had vibrations so I started backing off.”
Pointing to a lack of consistency for his below-par showing, the California native was at a loss to explain the drop-off in performance since the Kobalt Tools 500 back in March.
“All weekend it was different,” he underlined. “I don't know if the tyres were a little bit different or if the track conditions were different, but I really struggled with it. We had almost the exact same set-up we had here the last time when we had been really happy with it. I just never really had the car that I wanted; there were times when we were fast, but we just couldn't maintain it throughout the whole run.”
Looking ahead, Gordon vowed to put his Atlanta experience behind him and concentrate on the remaining three races of the 2007 campaign, beginning with the Dickies 500 at Texas Motor Speedway this coming weekend.
“All I can say is that when we had a 58-point lead coming in [to Atlanta], we didn't feel like we had a lead and the pressure was on,” the 36-year-old asserted. “Now we have a nine-point lead and the pressure is on even more. All we can do right now is go out and put up the best numbers and performance we possibly can on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and hope that it's enough.
