Jeff Gordon
Jeff Gordon
Jeffery Michael "Jeff" Gordonis an American semi-retired professional stock car racing driver and currently an announcer for Fox NASCAR. He formerly drove the No. 24 Chevrolet for Hendrick Motorsports in 23 full-time NASCAR Sprint Cup Series seasons between 1993 and 2015, and currently serves as a substitute driver for Dale Earnhardt Jr. in the No. 88 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRace Car Driver
Date of Birth4 August 1971
CityVallejo, CA
CountryUnited States of America
Our performances haven't been as bad as our finishes. We've had several races where we were completely off on our setup, but we've had numerous situations where we ran strong during the event but didn't have the good results to show for it.
Usually when you make up 52 points it's easy. It's not difficult. It's because something happens. You don't make it up because a guy ran bad and you went out there and led every lap and won the race.
Once I get focused on something that's the only thing I focus on. That can be good or bad in life, but in racing, it's typically pretty good.
It's not as bad as it used to be in Turn 4, but Turn 2 is pretty extreme. The way you come off the corner, you've got nice banking but then it really flattens off. ...It just makes your car want to drift to the wall. That makes it really difficult to get side-by-side.
It was a hell of a night. It's just one of those nights. You'll have those good nights when things will happen. We thought we had it at one time. I don't know if we just got a bad set of tires, over-adjusted or what. We were really looking good and then things just went backwards. We struggled back and forth all night.
They played fairly well overall. They just had a couple of bad holes. That's what beat us.
I've been fortunate where, when I've had bad years, we've usually ended those bad years with something positive to build on in the off-season. And that's what happened to us last year.
As bad as that was, we had to move forward in a positive way. If you look at James Dean or Elvis Presley after his death, it's the same thing with Earnhardt. That's the type of persona Dale Earnhardt had in our sport and the publicity of his death took it to another level.
Tony is a true American racer. You can put him in any car on any track, and he'll be fast. He's good on the short tracks, the intermediate tracks, the restrictor-plate tracks and the road courses.
Years like that make you hungrier, make you humble. You have no idea how disappointing it was.
Years like that make you hungrier, make you humble. The criticism has come a little bit stronger, come more often. I understand why. We've won four championships, a lot of races. We've prided ourselves on being competitive every year. When we're not, we recognize as well as everybody we're having an off year.
We're just happy to we have some things that have been positive and going our way. We haven't looked like we've had the best performance out there but we have had some good situations.
We're focused on our program, making our stuff as good as we can make it and then we'll find out how we stack up against the competition.
We're still not where we need to be on these types of tracks, but it's a learning process. We're learning from everything we're trying with the cars -- whether it works or not. Not every adjustment we make will work, but it gives us more data to make better decisions.