NASCAR WCUP: Robby Gordon 'relieved' to be in UAW-GM 500 field
6 October 2000
Posted By Terry
Callahan
Motorsports Editor, The Auto Channel
Robby Gordon qualified his Wolf Man Duracell/TurtleWax Menards Ford
25th for
Sunday's UAW GM 500 with a lap time of 29.501 seconds Wednesday night at
Charlotte Motor Speedway. The lap was Gordon's fastest of the entire day,
roughly three tenths better than what he produced in practice.
Quotes: ROBBY GORDON "Whew. What a relief, I'm glad that's over. The goal was to land in the top-25 and we accomplished that goal. I'm excited about this. Charlotte is tough, everyone comes with their guns loaded to this track, so we were anxious to see where we stacked up. We knew we had improved, but until you actually hit the track you can't completely gauge how much you've improved. This is exactly what we needed though, I'm happy for everyone here that's put in the hard work. Now we can focus on going racing on Sunday. This track is a lot of fun with 42 other cars. Last time we were here we had the car very hooked up towards the end of the race, hopefully we can find that from the beginning this time around and put on a good show.
"For qualifying we went to a stiffer front spring and it helped a ton. In practice we were bottoming hard early on down in turn 1. We kept making changes to raise the car a little bit and it still kept bottoming until all of a sudden we went too far and the car just became worse. The last practice run we didn't bottom but we almost lost it in three and four having no grip. Mark (Tutor) came up with a suggestion for qualifying and it worked very well. I drove into one as deep as I could and tried not to overdrive three and four. I guess I've always been a better racer than qualifier, but I'll take where we are today, this was a solid team effort."
Text Provided By Kinnon Marshall
Editors Note: To view hundreds of hot racing photos
and art, visit
The Racing
Photo Museum and the
Visions
of Speed Art Gallery.