Gordon can live with ‘lousy’ year

Dick Brinster

Thursday, Dec. 16, 1999 | 11:48 a.m.

Jeff Gordon laughed when told he and Babe Ruth had something in common.

When Ruth hit 54 home runs in 1928, some said he didn't live up to expectations after whacking a record-setting 60 the previous year. Many said the same thing about Gordon after last season on the NASCAR circuit.

"I never said it was a lousy year," he said. "But if it was, I'll take a few more just like it."

He paced the Winston Cup division in wins, poles and race earnings, and became the only driver to lead the circuit in victories five years in a row. But he failed to win the championship for the first time in three years.

Still, it was one of the best bad seasons a driver could imagine.

"I'll take seven wins anytime," said Gordon, who in 1998 tied Richard Petty's 23-year-old Winston Cup mark of 13 victories in a season. "We're still winning races, and we're very competitive. That's the key."

But the 28-year-old Gordon knows much work must be done for him to contend for a fourth title.

"Things don't always go well, but we're working hard to correct the problems we had this year," he said.

Despite opening the 1999 season with his second victory in the Daytona 500, Gordon soon began a pattern of failing to finish races.

While he was winning three championships in four years, some people called Gordon lucky. The popular line on his 1999 season was that the law of averages caught up with him. He doesn't think so.

"If you say it's bad luck, you're kidding yourself," Gordon explained. "You control your luck. The better prepared you are and the more you put into making sure everything is right the more you control how much bad luck you're going to have."

Gordon was sixth in the standings, his first below second since 1994, and failed to finish seven races.

Foremost among his problems was a decision to set up the car in a fashion that put considerable pressure on the right front tire. There were too many blowouts, and Gordon plans to take a different approach toward setups next year.

Dale Jarrett won his first championship despite just four victories in 1999. Gordon, Bobby Labonte and Jeff Burton won more often, but were not as consistent as Jarrett.

"I know that you can win championships with top-10 numbers every weekend, and you can't win championships by having DNFs," Gordon said. "It wasn't where we finished when we finished that mattered. It was where we finished when we didn't finish."

He concedes there were distractions as crew chief Ray Evernham left to become the point man and first car owner for the return of Dodge to Winston Cup racing in 2001. Evernham had guided Gordon to the first 47 of his 49 career victories.

When Evernham announced his departure from Hendrick Motorsports in September, things changed in a hurry.

Brian Whitesell took over, and Gordon won the next two races. Now Whitesell is the team manager, replaced by Robbie Loomis, who came over earlier this month after nine years as crew chief for Petty Enterprises.

Loomis is excited but plans no major changes.

"They were doing 99 percent of the stuff right," Loomis said. "Earlier in his career, Jeff took a lot advice in the car, but now he's reached the point where he knows so much about it that most of the decisions will be his."

One decision Gordon vows to make concerns the troublesome setups.

"I know we won't be running as much camber in the right front tire," he said of the angle at which the rubber meets the road.

That is critical, the fine line of a race car.

"It's how do you balance being fast enough to win races against not wanting to fall out of races," he said.

If Gordon and Loomis get it right, the finishes should be better than they were in 1999. Could that also mean a return to double figures in victories, perhaps even another run at 13?

"I don't say I can do that every year," Gordon said with a smile. "But at least I know it's possible."