Jeff Gordon and his No. 24 Drive to End Hunger team wanted to be apart of the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship and for seven weeks they did everything right in order to have a shot at it.
But early Sunday in Texas there Chase chances might have come to an end. Gordon hit the wall on lap 73 and suffered major enough damage to go to the garage. A blown left front tire the culprit.
“It didn’t give me enough of a warning, that is for sure. I was going down the front straightaway and I felt the car move around a little bit,” Gordon said in the garage. “That was odd. But, the wind was buffeting and blowing so strong, the cars are moving around anyway. Just before I got to turn one, I felt it go down. I did everything I could to slow it down”
Earlier in the race Kyle Busch also hit the wall, but was able to have his car repaired in his pit stall and remained in the race. Gordon needed more substantial repairs on his car, which entered the day third in points just 27 points behind leaders Matt Kenseth and Jimmie Johnson.
“It is so unfortunate. This Drive to End Hunger team has done such an amazing job. I am so proud of them to get us where we are. You just can’t have things like this happen if you are going to make a run at a championship or battle with those guys,” Gordon said.
“We had a great race car. We just didn’t take off good on the restarts, but once we got going by eight to 10 laps into it, boy were we really strong.”
Following his first win of the season last weekend in Martinsville, Gordon was thought to have moved himself in good position for his fifth championship. He was within a race of Kenseth and Johnson but would have needed them to stumble in order to significantly close the gap heading into the final two races of the season.
At Texas he started the day eighth and was running in the top 12 at the time of the accident. He’s likely to now fall outside of the top five in points at the conclusion of Sunday’s AAA Texas 500.
Two races remain in the 2013 NSCS season, both tracks Gordon has recently won at. He won at Phoenix in the spring of 2011 for the first time and finished ninth there earlier this year. He’s the defending winner at Homestead-Miami Speedway where the NSCS ends its season in two weeks.
“I don’t know if it was a slow leak or if it just went all of a sudden. Our car just didn’t take off very good, but boy was it strong on the long runs,” Gordon said. “We just needed to get some better track position; get on the inside on those restarts, and we actually had a really, really good race car.
“But unfortunate. This is definitely going to hurt. We just get what we can out of this day and go on to Phoenix.”
