Jeff Gordon will be racing for Cup title after Martinsville win
Jeff Gordon has a chance to go out a champion.
The four-time Sprint Cup Series champ got his ninth win at Martinsville on Sunday. And the win means he’s going to be one of the four drivers racing for the Sprint Cup Series title at Homestead on November 21.
Gordon, 43, is retiring at the end of the season. In victory lane he was jumping up and down and screaming, calling the win the “sweetest feeling.”
It’s Gordon’s first win of the season and the 93rd of his career. The emotion Gordon showed after the checkered flag was perhaps the most exuberant the surefire Hall of Famer has ever been after a win. He even joked he was going to unretire and return to the cockpit of his No. 24 at the end of the season.
He got the win thanks to some ridiculousness from another veteran. Matt Kenseth used his wounded car as a battering ram to crash leader Joey Logano. Kenseth, the 2003 champion was unhappy about an incident with Logano while the two were racing for the lead at Kansas. Kenseth’s car was beaten up after contact with Brad Keselowski, Logano’s teammate, so he decided to exact his revenge on Logano when Logano lapped him.
It was the second time in as many weeks that the closing events in a Sprint Cup Series race were unceremonious at best and downright dubious at worst.
The crash put Gordon into a great position for the win, but it didn’t come without drama. As darkness fell upon Martinsville, a crash soon caused another caution. Gordon came to pit road for tires and restarted third behind AJ Allmendinger and Denny Hamlin with 30 laps to go.
He got around both thanks to fresher tires and seemed poised to take the checkered flag until another accident. The final restart came with two laps to go and Gordon dispatched Jamie McMurray for the win.
Not only was Gordon winless until Sunday, he really hadn’t been a consistent threat for a win throughout the 2015 season. He entered the race with four top-five finishes, the fewest he’s had in any season in his career. His 227 laps led through 32 races also put him on pace to have the fewest laps led in any season outside of his rookie campaign.
But he avoided mass calamity throughout the season and especially during the Chase. Gordon entered Martinsville believing his team had a shot at a win over the next three races and happy with the speed he’d shown through the first six races of the Chase. Four of his 17 top-10 finishes had come in the Chase and his lowest finish in NASCAR’s playoffs had been 14th.
And not only does he have a shot at the title, he’ll avoid all Ryan Newman comparisons as well. While a Gordon title run is set to be a big PR boost for NASCAR among casual followers and non-NASCAR covering media outlets, a title run without a win would have come with a lot of questions.
In 2014, the first year of NASCAR’s elimination Chase format and supposedly renewed emphasis on winning, Newman finished second in the championship without winning a race the entire season. Had Gordon been in a similar position, the viability of NASCAR’s format would once again have been questioned more than normal.
Instead, the chance for the fairytale ending to Gordon’s career is intact while the sport attempts to sort through the (literal) wreckage its governance helped create to provide Gordon the opportunity for the win.
