Gordon wins race and regains Winston Cup lead

Monday, June 29, 1998 | 9:54 a.m.

Sometimes a driver has to make his team's strategy work.

That's just what Jeff Gordon did Sunday when he charged from the middle of the field to win the Save Mart-Kragen 350-kilometer race on the road course at Sears Point Raceway in Sonoma, Calif.

Gordon, who regained the series points lead with his fourth victory of the season and the 33rd of his Winston Cup career, led the first 36 laps before making the first of his scheduled pit stops.

Several of the leaders chose to pit at the same time, while others remained on the 1.95-mile, 11-turn course. Gordon found himself back in the middle of the pack, and he didn't get back into the lead until he bumped past Bobby Hamilton on lap 102 of the 112-lap, 218-mile race.

As the race played out, Mark Martin, who Gordon said he expected to be the man to beat, never completely recovered from a flat tire in the early going.

Instead of Martin, the defending race winner and one of NASCAR's best road racers, it was the surprising Hamilton who Gordon had to catch.

"I don't have a clue what to do around these places," Hamilton said after winding up second in his best road racing performance ever.

Gordon found that hard to believe.

"I didn't know if I could catch Bobby, then I didn't know if I could pass him, then I didn't know if I could keep him behind me," Gordon said.

On a track where most of the drivers said passing would be all but impossible, Gordon cut a swatch through the field, coming from 20th in the second half of the race. And most of his passes, including the one that put him back in the lead, came in the hairpin, a 35 mph turn that carries the drivers onto the main straightaway.

"There's no other place to pass out there," said Gordon, who won $160,675.

IRL:At Loudon, N.H., with his big lead slipping away and the disaster of two years ago rattling around in his head, Tony Stewart sweated through probably the longest 18 laps of his racing career. "I couldn't count them fast enough," he said. But he held on to the last second of what had been an 11-second lead and won Sunday's New England 200 at the New Hampshire International Speedway for his third career IRL victory. "It proves if we don't break, we can win races," he said after his 1.8-second victory over Scott Goodyear. In the three races Stewart has finished this season, he has won two and finished second in the other. But breakdown was on his mind for the final 18 laps, remembering what befell him on the mile oval two years ago. His closest challenger in that race was more than two laps behind when Stewart pulled into the pits on the 182nd lap with mechanical problems. So Sunday, he "heard every little thing that happened" in his car for the final 18 laps, worried about another breakdown. "I probably created more noise in my head," he said. Behind him, Goodyear was not imagining any mechanical problems; his were real. He had no fifth and sixth gears for the last 80 laps. The victory boosted Stewart into the IRL point lead alone with 167 points, breaking a tie with Scott Sharp, who finished third and has 150. Las Vegan Davey Hamilton, the only other driver on the lead lap at the finish, was fourth. Sam Schmidt, also of Las Vegas, finished 12th.FORMULA ONE: Ferrari's Formula One resurgence. "It's hard work, many nights and night shifts that the team provided what we had here this week," said Schumacher, the French Grand Prix winner Sunday. "They really pushed hard to make it for us and we are here." The German star teamed with Northern Ireland's Eddie Irvine to give the Italian carmaker its record 41st 1-2 sweep in a Grand Prix race. Ferrari has won 116 Grand Prix races, most in the history of Formula One. Schumacher, also the Canadian Grand Prix victory three weeks ago, is proving that Ferraris have closed the gap on the McLaren-Mercedes of Finland's Mika Hakkinen and Scotland's David Coulthard. "These promising statistics make me feel optimistic about the future," said Schumacher, who won the 1994 and 1995 driving titles with Benetton. On Sunday, Schumacher took advantage of a race re-start to give Ferrari its first 1-2 finish since the 1990 Spanish Grand Prix when Alan Prost and Nigel Mansell took the top two slots.BUSCH GN:At Watkins Glen, Ron Fellows took full advantage of his first start in Winston Cup driver Joe Nemechek's Busch series car. Fellows, making just his second NASCAR Grand National appearance with Nemechek in California for the Save Mart-Kragen 350k, won the Lysol 200 at Watkins Glen International on Sunday. "I love this place," said Fellows, a Canadian who also won last year's Craftsman Truck Series race on the 2.45-mile road course. Fellows qualified second, but found himself in the lead seconds after the start when pole-sitter Boris Said spun off course in Turn 1. Fellows led four times for 54 of the race's 82 laps.