FT. WORTH, Tex. - Texas Motor Speedway is one of only two tracks where Jeff Gordon has not won a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race, a statistic he hopes to erase in Sunday's Samsing 500.
Only the 1.5-mile Lone Star State track and Homestead-Miami Speedway are left on Gordon's hit list and the four-time champion believes he has a chance to cross Texas off that list this weekend.
"It is a very challenging race track," Gordon said. "That can be good and that can be bad for us. We have been real hit or miss here. We have been good enough to win at times, but we haven't been good enough on a consistent basis to pull off that win."
"There are bumps, there are transitions, there is a lot of grip, very fast race track. I think facility wise; I think this place is the top. You look at what they have put in the whole entire facility; it is the best that is out there. It is a great purse, all those things are good but the track is definitely a very challenging one."
While Gordon doesn't have a Texas Cup win to his credit, he has come close several times.
"It is frustrating that the two times, maybe three times, I feel like we were capable of winning here, that we didn't do it," he said. "We have been leading here with less than 50 laps to go and didn't pull off the win and those are frustrating."
While the Hendrick Motorsports team has gone winless so far in 2008, Gordon believes there are signs that point to that statistic also ending very soon.
"I feel like we have been competitive every weekend, it doesn't always show up in the results," Gordon said. "There are some other teams that have got off to a better start than us. You compare to last year, the type of season we had, yea, looks like things have been pretty rough for us. But it hasn't been."
"We have been competitive, we have been leading laps, we have been running good and even at the 1.5-mile, we have been extremely good. I think Bristol is about the only track we have struggled at this whole year. Yes, I feel good about it. This year I feel like one of the better teams on the mile and half-tracks. This is a track that we have struggled at in past so you never know exactly how good you are going to be even if you run good at the other ones."
