Jeff Gordon, the four-time NASCAR champion, will cap his full-time driving career when he competes in the season-ending NASCAR race at Homestead-Miami Speedway on Sunday (Monday morning Sydney time).
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Said Truex: “Decent day for us”.
Buescher needed to finish 13th or better without leading a lap to win the championship in Homestead. He’s not only proud of what’s been accomplished, Truex Jr.is certain there’s more to the story yet to be written on Sunday.
“When you can deal with a professional athlete and you can go 23 years and you don’t need a lawyer, you can take a handshake and we’ve never had a disagreement … he’s a rare commodity”, said team owner Rick Hendrick. “So it’s not a racetrack like last week at Phoenix or even a Loudon or something like that where it’s pretty single-file, hard to pass. This place is good, so I don’t know that qualifying position has anything to say what kind of race we’ll see on Sunday”.
With so much at stake, Lemay and Huston eventually found a risky route through rural roads that eventually got them to South Florida just one hour before the garage area opened Thursday afternoon. Earlier on Friday, the sole Cup practice session of the day had been curtailed due to showers, although qualifying itself proved to be unaffected by any inclement conditions. With its elimination-style Chase format still very much a controversial topic in its second year, NASCAR is hoping that, like in 2014, the championship will be decided at the front of the field, not somewhere buried in the pack. His first two victories in his sophomore season were the Coca-Cola 600 and the Brickyard 400. Although he hasn’t won a Chase race, he’s stayed out of trouble on the track and been consistent enough to land a spot in the final four. Why he will win: He might just be the best driver going in terms of talent. “But it’s something you don’t really want to have to go through, that’s for sure”. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t a tick better”.
After announcing that 2015 would be his final season in Sprint Cup, Gordon had a bad start by any standard with finishes of 33rd at Daytona, 41st at Atlanta and 18th at Las Vegas. The wreck knocked Logano out of the race and led to Jeff Gordon’s first win of the season.
“I guess that’s definitely out of the window now”, he said. “I thought that was good! I wasn’t that proud at the moment because we started 21st, but I will remember that forever”. “Hopefully, I have a long career in this and I can be doing this for a while”. The stuff I do away from the track really has no bearing.
“I’m having the time of my life”, he said.
“For a lot of reasons”, Truex said, “we are the underdog”. “That’s all you can ask for besides getting the pole”.
“I remember the first time we raced against each other he blew my doors off, and about 40 laps later he blew up”, Busch said.
It’s all about the possibility of a fairy tale finish to one of the greatest racing careers ever. I didn’t run a good line on the last run. I should have ran on the fence.
“Coming into this week and dealing with the second opportunity has not been near as hard or near as stressful as it was previous year”, Harvick said.
Arguably the outsider of the four remaining title contenders is Furniture Row Racing’s Martin Truex Jr., who qualified in 11th place for the grand finale. “I think everybody is nervous and everybody knows what’s at stake”. He is the only championship finalist who will not start in the Top 10.
Gordon won the pole for last year’s race here, but he hadn’t made a prediction about this session. Right now, I’m not even thinking and fathoming that.
“It’s still going to be a hell of a battle”. He finished in the top-five 69 percent of the time – 22 out of 32 races. The top finisher among these four will be crowned the champion. Not only is Kevin Harvick going for a repeat but this is Jeff Gordon’s final race.
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Gordon must earn that one, just as he did the other 93. “We just never really recovered from what we did in the first round to make it repeat. I think our balance was, too”. “We have been struggling with the vehicle and we really haven’t hit on anything that helped it. So we are going to go in there and work on it right now and hopefully come up with something”.
