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Robby Gordon Qualifying Notes/Quotes Friday, March 3, 2000

4 March 2000

Robby Gordon
#13 Menards Ford Taurus
Team Gordon CarsDirect.com 400 Qualifying Notes/Quotes Friday, March 3, 2000
Round 3 of 34 in the NASCAR Winston Cup Series
Las Vegas Motor Speedway - Las Vegas, NV

Three up and three down for Team Gordon in first round qualifying this
season.  Today's lap of 31.717 seconds placed Robby Gordon's Menards Ford
Taurus 12th in the field for Sunday's CarsDirect 400 in Las Vegas.  Gordon
improved his time considerably from practice to qualifying, and like last
week at Rockingham, gained almost a half of a second.  The key to Gordon's
lap was freeing up the car in what team engineer Doug Louth called, "a
moderate gamble."  What he meant was there was a risk of possibly
over-shooting the boundary and making the car too loose.  But as Gordon
explained, the risk wasn't as risky as it might have seemed.    

Quotes:
ROBBY GORDON  "We struggled early today, but the car kept getting better.
Every time we came in to make changes the car responded positively.  When
we made our last run on sticker tires before qualifying I knew we had
something, even though the car was still too tight.  I sat down with Doug
Louth and Fred Graves and we decided to loosen the car up quite a bit for
qualifying.  Doug said it was a little bit of a gamble, but I said, "Lets
do it, we won't be too bad off, I think it's exactly what we need.
   "On the lap, I drove it in deeper than I had all day into turn one. The
car started to push, so I had to back out of it a tad.   After that
though, the lap was very comfortable.  I wasn't on edge at all; it was smooth and
solid.  It's a big relief, anytime you qualify on the first day it makes
Saturday a productive day for race setups.  Always learning, that's the
plan.  I'm looking forward to having a good race, this track can be a lot
of fun if your car is competitive."