Gordon Not Ready to Stick Neck Out

NASCAR’s latest long-running hit show, “Jeff Gordon, Road Racer,” makes its annual return to Sears Point Raceway today.

Gordon, who grew up over the hill in Vallejo, has won the last three Winston Cup races here, and there will be few among the 100,000 fans at the Dodge/Save Mart 350 who aren’t expecting him to make it four. He will start from the pole, and the pole-winner has won three of the last four races on the 10-turn course, which has been reconfigured slightly to two miles this year.

In eight starts here, Gordon has three victories, two poles and five top-five finishes. During his current three-win streak, he has led 171 of a possible 336 laps, or 51%.

Gordon is also the hottest driver on the Winston Cup circuit. The three-time champion has won three of his last five races and last week finished second to Ricky Rudd in the Pocono 500. And the Monte Carlo chassis he is running, No. 2427, has won five times at Sears Point and Watkins Glen, the Winston Cup’s only two road courses.

Still, the 30-year-old Hendrick Motorsports driver seems perplexed by his remarkable success as a road racer.

“This whole thing is amazing to me because I remember the first time I started running on road courses and how lost I was,” Gordon said. “I grew up racing sprint cars and open-wheel cars on ovals. I didn’t know if I would ever get it. To get comfortable and get confidence in what I was doing and be able to give the proper feedback to the team and then for them to get the car the way we like it, it’s been amazing.

“Three in a row may make it look like it’s been easy, but road courses are tough to win on. Last year’s race was a battle with some guys bumping and banging all day. If you get distracted, you start to make mistakes.

“With so many turns and shifts, you are going to make mistakes. You just have to recover from them, put them behind you, focus on the next corner and get back into your rhythm.”

A win today in the $3,493,689 race would give Gordon another place in the NASCAR record books. He is currently tied with Richard Petty, Bobby Allison and Rusty Wallace for the most career road race victories at six. Wallace is also in today’s race and will start alongside Gordon on the front row in a Roger Penske Ford Taurus.

“I’m still a big fan of the original old track we used to have here, but that’s gone and we’ve got to do with what’s here,” said Wallace, who won here in 1990 after twice winning at the old Riverside International Raceway.

“They’ve got so many doggone corners around here I can’t keep track of all of them.”

If there could be a surprise winner in the 112-lap race it might come from a group of road racing specialists, such as Scott Pruett, Ron Fellows and Brian Simo. Pruett and Fellows were members of a GM Corvette team that won the GT class at the 24 Hours of LeMans last week.

Pruett is replacing the injured Joe Nemecheck in Andy Petree’s Chevrolet.

Jim Inglebright won the accident-strewn Snap-On Tools 200 on Saturday, driving a Chevrolet. It was the Sacramento driver’s second consecutive Featherlite Southwest series victory at Sears Point.

Series points leader M.K. Kanke, of Frazier Park, remained hospitalized at Sonoma Valley Hospital after undergoing surgery for a broken right thigh bone. Kanke’s car crashed during practice Thursday when his engine blew, sending the car into the wall. He had won the last two races, at Irwindale and Mesa Marin in Bakersfield.

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Today’s Race

* What: NASCAR Winston Cup Dodge/Save Mart 350.

* Where: Sears Point Raceway (permanent road course, 2 miles, 10 turns); Sonoma, Calif.

* Defending champion: Jeff Gordon.

* TV: Channel 11, noon.