Smith reverses trend with a solid run at Darlington
DARLINGTON, S.C. -- It's a pretty good sign when a driver is disappointed with a career-best run at Darlington Raceway and his second-best finish of the season.
That was the case for Regan Smith, who wound up 17th in Saturday night's Showtime Southern 500 but knew as soon as he climbed from the car that he deserved better. As team members continued to come up to him to offer congratulations, Smith was trying to offer apologies.
We've struggled for a couple of weeks now ... so it was nice to have a good run. It's a step in the right direction.
He shouldn't have bothered. Smith ran inside the top 10 for much of the second half of the race, but a decision to go with a two-tire stop on the team's final trip to the pits wound up costing him when the car's handling went away. So what could have been a great evening for Smith and Furniture Row Racing turned out merely to be very good.
"It was a good run," Smith said. "I'm a little bummed out over the finish, because we were sitting higher most of the night, but we got two tires and most of the other guys got four, and it just didn't work for us. We got really, really tight there at the end. But we've struggled for a couple of weeks now and had some bad luck at Talladega, so it was nice to have a good run. It's a step in the right direction."
Back-to-back lousy finishes had Smith's No. 78 Chevrolet sliding precariously closer to the cutoff for the guaranteed starting spots given to the teams in the top 35 in owners' points. But his run at Darlington gained him two positions -- up to 31st -- and some much-needed positive momentum heading into Dover.
Smith had been running with the leaders at Talladega when his engine suddenly went sour, leaving him with a 38th-place finish. And last week at Richmond, he struggled all evening and wound up 30th.
But Smith knew right from the moment that the car was unloaded from the hauler that he had a chassis capable of running with the big dogs.
"The car was strong," Smith said. "It was strong when we unloaded it and we just kept working on it from that point on. I don't have a ton of laps here, but I have enough to know what the right things to do are. You've got to have a car left at the end, and we did, so it was cool."
And when did he realize that a good finish might be in the cards?
"[Saturday] in practice," Smith said. "The car was that good in practice. So I figured if I didn't do anything too stupid, we'd be OK."
With newer equipment being added to the team's stable, Smith said the potential is now there for even more success.
"We're a young team, we're a new team," Smith said. "Everything is new to us, right down to the chassis that we're running and we're learning those. We're learning what I like in those chassis and I think we're starting to get that baseline that we need and we're just going to keep getting better."
For Gordon, a little good luck amidst all of the bad
Rare mistake by four-time champ turns into good finish
DARLINGTON, S.C. -- It all happened so fast. Jeff Gordon and crew chief Steve Letarte were talking on the radio, wrestling with the decision whether to take two tires or four tires, and trying to reach a consensus as the pit road entrance loomed. Finally, the call was made -- come in and take two. That's when Gordon looked into his rearview mirror, and saw a lapped car bearing down on him hard.
In the rush, the four-time champion driver had made a simple mistake: he had forgotten to signal to the cars behind him that he was coming in to pit. He tried to get out of the way, tried to slow down in time, but he was too late. The pit-road commitment cone loomed so large in his windshield that he was about to hit it. So Gordon drove on by, back out onto the race track, angry at himself for forgetting something so elementary.
If we'd have gotten out front, we'd have had something for them. But I don't know that we were ever going to get out front of the 11.
And yet, it might have been the best thing that could have happened to him Saturday night at Darlington. Once again, he had the best car for long stretches of the race. Once again he led the most laps, this time 110. And once again he wasn't the driver celebrating in Victory Lane, settling for fourth as Denny Hamlin sprayed champagne.
So why was his No. 24 team feeling so fortunate? Because Gordon's abandoned two-tire pit call came seconds before Joey Logano crashed in Turn 2, bringing out a yellow that very well might have trapped his black and red Chevy a lap down. As it turned out, Gordon's evasive maneuver cost him track position, but it also allowed him to pit for four tires. That was enough to race up through the field and claim his fifth top-five finish of the season, which moved him up two places to fourth in points.
"We were going to come in and pit a little early and take two. I just didn't signal to the guys behind me, and I was going to get run over," Gordon said. "I just didn't get slowed down enough. My fault. Of course, Steve said if we had pitted and the caution had come out, we'd have been in trouble. But I don't like making mistakes like that."
Even so, without that miscue Gordon might have endured a truly frustrating finish to a night that at the beginning looked like it might end his now 40-race winless streak. Gordon started second and was the class of the field early, leading large chunks of laps until a hot, steamy afternoon turned into a cool evening that played havoc with his car.
"They dropped the green, and we were just a rocket. You worry sometimes at a place like this when it cools down how you're going to maintain that speed and stay on top of the adjustments. We got off a little bit, and some guys ended up being a little better than us at times, but track position was just key," Gordon said.
"It was a strange night. There were times when it was like, we're in a league of our own, the car feels awesome, we were just cruising. And then all of the sudden the right-front tire felt like it had 150 pounds of air in it. It happened very, very quick. My car was really good in clean air, but when we caught traffic, it just wasn't that good. When that happened, we lost a half a second."
Still, he was in the mix for most of the night. But in the end, even though he had four fresh tires when many of the other leaders had two, he just couldn't muster a charge. "If we'd have gotten out front, we'd have had something for them," Gordon said. "But I don't know that we were ever going to get out front of the 11 [car of Hamlin]."
Toward that end, fourth was good enough. It was the latest in a string of close calls for Gordon, who's led in nine of 11 Cup Series races this season, and whose 709 cumulative laps led are far are away the best on the circuit. He's led 219 at Las Vegas, 92 at Martinsville, 124 at Texas, 144 at Richmond, and now 110 at Darlington. He had cars capable of winning at Phoenix and Talladega, two events where he rarely sniffed the front. Few drivers have performed as consistently well this season -- and yet still that first victory of the 2010 campaign eludes him.
Saturday night, though, was easier to take. "I don't think we had the car," Gordon said. "I think we missed the setup [Saturday] a little bit. We didn't have the dominating car we've had the last few races. I felt like it wasn't our race to win, that we were going to have to take it away from somebody, and we just kept fighting and battling through track position, hoping that if we got the track position, we could get up there and win."
At Darlington, they didn't have it. But the season-long performance gives Gordon hope that the breakthrough is coming soon.
"We certainly hope so," Gordon said. "This team is certainly doing the job we need to do to get into Victory Lane. We're knocking on that door, we're leading laps, and we're having a lot of fun, that's for sure. It's been a while since this 24 car has run like this, and I can't wait to get to Dover."
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