Gordon’s Road Back to Victory Lane Is Familiar

Before the NASCAR Nextel Cup race Sunday, Jeff Gordon was inducted into the Infineon Raceway Walk of Fame for being the only four-time winner here.

Make that the only five-time winner.

Gordon, who grew up in nearby Vallejo, used his homecoming in scenic wine country to win the Dodge/Save Mart 350 and bolster his bid to get back into the chase for a fifth Cup championship.

The Hendrick Motorsports driver, the best Cup regular ever on road courses such as 1.99-mile Infineon Raceway, kept his Chevrolet ahead through several late caution periods to hold off Ryan Newman and Terry Labonte in front of 100,000 on a hot, clear day.

It was the first win of 2006 for the 34-year-old Gordon -- he hadn’t reached victory lane since October in Martinsville, Va. -- and the 74th of his career.

The victory gave Gordon a record nine wins on road courses, and it lifted him into the top 10 in this year’s points standings.

Only the top 10 can compete for the Chase for the Championship during the final 10 races of the year. Gordon missed the Chase in 2005, and before Sunday was sitting 11th in points this year. Now he’s eighth.

Gordon conceded that he was feeling the pressure -- he avoided reading newspapers or websites for fear of being reminded about his struggles -- and that “it’s a relief” to win again.

“You can’t even describe the emotions,” he said. “I got a little choked up riding around in the car with the checkered flag.”

Gordon said his No. 24 Chevrolet “has just been so good all week, I couldn’t wait to get out here.” So much so that Sunday morning, he called his crew chief, Steve Letarte, and made a rare prediction.

“I said, ‘One, we’re going to win this race,’ ” Gordon recalled, “ ‘and two, I’m engaged.’ ”

Indeed, three years after Gordon and his first wife, Brooke, completed a highly publicized divorce, Gordon announced that he had proposed to his girlfriend, Belgian model Ingrid Vandebosch.

Newman’s runner-up finish was the highest this year for the Dodge driver on the Penske Racing South team, which also includes Kurt Busch, who started on the pole and finished fifth.

And Labonte’s third-place finish also was the best yet for Hall of Fame Racing, a new team co-owned by former Dallas Cowboys quarterbacks Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman.

Staubach was ecstatic after the race, hugging Labonte and saying, “To come in third today, I feel like we’ve won the Super Bowl. Well, almost won the Super Bowl.”

Driving duties for the Staubach/Aikman car are being split this year between Tony Raines and the taciturn Labonte, who is in his farewell year as a Cup driver after a 26-year career. Before Sunday, Hall of Fame’s best finish was a 16th by Raines at Pocono Raceway two weeks ago.

Labonte, 49, has won 22 times in more than 840 starts, including two victories at the old Riverside International Raceway road course in the 1980s. He also won the series championship in 1984 and 1996.

After starting 37th in the 43-car field, Labonte used a fuel-saving pit strategy to work his Chevrolet to the front on the twisting, 10-turn course. But “it was going to take a slip on his part probably for us to get him,” Labonte said of Gordon.

Another Chevy driver, defending race winner and reigning Cup champion Tony Stewart, couldn’t keep up with Gordon and the other leaders because of a crippled engine during the race’s final laps.

Stewart, a two-time winner at Infineon for Joe Gibbs Racing, finished 28th.

The race had barely started when several cars crashed on the first lap after Ken Schrader spun sideways in the eighth turn and was hit broadside by Sterling Marlin.

“I looked up and saw all kinds of cars and said, ‘There ain’t no way they are all going to miss us,’ and they didn’t,” Schrader said.

The race was stopped under a red flag for 12 minutes while officials cleared away the wreckage. Casey Mears of Bakersfield, Clint Bowyer and Tom Hubert also suffered damage.

Jimmie Johnson of El Cajon, Calif., a Gordon teammate at Hendrick, finished 10th and still leads the Nextel Cup points standings.

Gordon’s margin of victory over Newman was 1.3 seconds. There were seven caution periods and nine lead changes among eight drivers.