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player ready...A crew chief can script a NASCAR race only so far. Steve Letarte had a masterpiece going until circumstances tore it to shreds with a dozen laps left in regulation Saturday night at Lowe’s Motor Speedway.
From there his driver, Jeff Gordon, had to ad lib — like John Wayne in a foxhole moving at 185 m.p.h. — through the overtime finish of the Bank of America 500.
“Steve’s a game-planner,” Gordon said after his second straight Cup win and his sixth of the season, as Saturday night turned into the wee hours of Sunday morning.
Then Gordon cracked, “I just do my best to try to give races away at the end and still pull it off.”
Gordon hadn’t tried to give it away. It was more that circumstances and other drivers kept trying to rip what should have been a cakewalk finish from his grasp.
With 50 laps left in regulation, Gordon, executing the plan, rocketed into the lead and showed his hand for the first time.
From there he was breezing, until Johnny Sauter’s blown engine and crash made an enormous mess of the front stretch — so bad that a yellow flag was replaced by a red one, a full stop, for more than 12 minutes. Even after the field began moving under yellow, the cleanup lasted until only five laps remained of the scheduled 334.
Gordon’s Chevrolet was running low on fuel, and he was concerned about full power on the restart.
Sure enough, his engine coughed for a moment and Ryan Newman shot out of nowhere, from fourth to first. But Gordon held off his other attackers, teammate Kyle Busch and third-place Chase contender Clint Bowyer.
Then, just two laps later, Newman’s charge was devastated by a blown tire, and he crashed. Another caution came out, forcing a green-white-checkered overtime.
Now the challenger was Bowyer, and Gordon’s worry was the same — low fuel. But Gordon floored the throttle and took the chance, so aggressively that he spun his tires and Bowyer ran into the back of him on the restart, rather than making a pass.
And Gordon got away, harried but clean, for his first win here since 1999. That widened his Chase playoff lead over his teammate, protege and chief championship competition, Jimmie Johnson, to 68 points. Bowyer remained third, 78 points back.
Johnson led the most laps in the race but spun with 104 laps remaining, struggled the rest of the race and wound up 14th.
The script “worked good until the [Sauter] yellow came out after the [breezy] green flag run,” Letarte said. “We played conservative for the first 150 laps. … We didn’t want to show our hand.
“We had a strategy from there: We never took four [tires on one pit stop] the rest of the night. We took lefts, we took rights, and it worked out. The car was the best at the end.
“The green flag run, I think, said it all,” Letarte continued. “If the yellows hadn’t come out, it was going to be an uneventful night.”
With a script like that, and an ad lib under fire like that, they didn’t need it.
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