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Jeff Gordon Wins Pocono 500

9 June 1997

LONG POND, PA -- For Jeff Gordon it was a day of ups and and downs. But Gordon was 'up' when it counted the most--at the end of the Pocono 500 NASCAR Winston Cup event run at Pocono Raceway.

Gordon started the day deep in the field, well at least for the #24 DuPont Chevrolet, at eleventh. From there Gordon charged right to the front and picked up the lead on lap 19. Then on lap 23 Gordon began to have problems and started a slow slide back through the field. Gordon sensed that he had a tire going down and called to the Rainbow Warriors telling them the problem. "I knew something was wrong right away," said Gordon "I would have come in a little bit sooner but I came in before and they said, 'No, Jeff. It wasn't the tire.' I thought maybe when I got up high I just got some stuff on my tires. But then it just kept getting worse and worse. I said, 'Boys, we've got a problem. We've got to get in.' I made that call, but they're the ones that made the great stops and got those tires on there." Gordon returned to the track perilously close to being a lap down.

Ward Burton, who was having a great run in the MBNA Pontiac, tried hard to close in and put Gordon down a lap but to no avail. It was divine intervention and Bobby Labonte that saved Gordon's day. On lap 56 Bobby spun coming out of turn one and brought out the caution flag, just a few laps ahead of when Gordon would have had to make a scheduled pit stop. Gordon said of the break, "Yeah. Right away we knew the Lord was on our side again today and certainly was blessing this team today with great ability and great pit stops, too."

From there Gordon hovered in the top-five and his position was more or less dependent on the varying track conditions as the sun would pop in and out changing the handle on all the cars. Gordon, talking about how his car was better when the track was covered by the clouds said, "We were slipping and sliding. I'd lose the front end and then I'd lose the back end and when the clouds came, man, that thing stuck like glue."

In the late stages of the race, pit strategy started coming into play. The last round of pit stops had some teams taking two tires and fuel while others took four and fuel. Ray Evernham, Gordon's crew chief, decided on a four tire stop and as it would turn out that was the right call. Gordon then only had to 'hold off' Jeff Burton to get the win. Gordon making the ending sound a bit closer than it was said, "I'll tell you what, if Jeff Burton had gotten to me, I think it would have been a different story. It would have been a heckuva race. I tried to keep him as far behind me as I could. He was closing a little bit on me there at the end but at least we had enough distance. I can't say enough for this team. Every race that we win I'm more and more amazed that we're pulling into victory lane." Gordon's margin of victory over second place finisher Jeff Burton was 1.415 seconds.

Jeff Burton, who seems to excel at these superspeedways, also fought the varying track conditions as well as an adjuster that couldn't be used. "I think we both were a little bit too tight," said Burton. "It seems like when it got cloudy the last two stops it may have hurt us a little more than it hurt him. I was able to run him down. It looked like he was loose when I was able to run him down. Maybe the clouds helped him a little bit. We had a track bar adjustment we wanted to make but a piece of rubber got down in the hole and we couldn't adjust it. The only thing we could do was adjust wedge and that wasn't going to fix the problem that we had."

Dale Jarrett in the Quality Care Ford, who has been plagued of late with DNFs, finished in the third spot. "We ran well all day and the guys did a terrific job," stated Jarrett. "We made some pretty big adjustments and they didn't lose any spots making those adjustments so the pit crew did a good job. We just got too tight. The sun and clouds played havoc with us. When it was cloudy early in the race I was really good. When the sun came out, I was pretty loose. It looked like the sun was going to stay out and we made a pretty big adjustment and it just got too tight. It feels good to finish. We would have liked to have won but this is what we've got to do."

I'm real happy to run fourth," said Mark Martin, driver of the Valvoline Ford. Martin's Roush-prepared Thunderbird has been strong lately and finished in the top-five the last five times out. Martin speaking of what it took to get his fourth place finish said, "We had great team work again today. It got us a top-five finish. The car was almost as fast as the leaders there at the end. I'll take it. We need to tune up a little bit if we want to win. We're going to have to pick up the pace a little bit. There were a lot of them that ran behind us. So we outran a lot of good cars today but we had a few outrun us."

The driver rounding out the top-five and backing up his impressive fourth-place finish at Dover last week was Jeremy Mayfield in the Kmart/RC Cola Ford. "This means a lot," said Mayfield. We've done this (finished in the top-five) the last two or three weeks and it's starting to get my confidence up. It's got the team's confidence up and mine. We've got better cars and everything is coming together for us."

Ward Burton got the five bonus points for leading the most laps today. But that is little consolation to Burton as the motor in his MBNA Pontiac let go early and left him with a 38th place finish. A disappointed Burton said, "The MBNA team has worked hard. We've got a good team here. We just can't get a break. We're going to win one before it's over with."

The points battle heats to a rapid boil this week after Terry Labonte finished in the ninth position. This brings both Gordon and Labonte to a dead heat tie with 1,955 each points each in the series points battle. Martin, Jarrett and Jeff Burton each hold their original third through fifth spots respectively.

The race took 3 hours 34 minutes 33 seconds to complete and maintained an average speed of 139.828 mph. There were 25 lead changes among 15 drivers. The caution flew only 4 times for a total of 22 laps. Gordon won a total of $166,080 in winnings today. This includes the $80,000 Winston Leader bonus from Winston for leading the points battle and winning the race today. The tie breaker for this program is season victories of which Gordon has six and Terry Labonte has none.

The next race will be the Miller 400 to be run next Sunday at Michigan Speedway.

Mike Snow -- The Auto Channel