Jeff Gordon finally breaks his career-high 47 race winless drought after scoring his first win at the 1.5 mile Texas Speedway.Gordon led 6 times for the race high 105 laps. He resumed the lead with 27 laps to go onto his 1st win and 9th top-10 finish in 17 races @ Texas. It marks Gordon's 82nd career win. He remains 6th on the all-time wins list, one behind Cale Yarborough. Bobby Allison and Darrell Waltrip are tied for third with 84 victories each.
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"It feels like the very first time I've ever won. It's been a long streak. It's been a lot of ups and downs and tough times, not only here at Texas but just over the past, I don't know they keep reminding me I think it was 46, 47 races. And I knew we were going to get one eventually. I feel like we had some missed opportunities last season, even as we didn't have a great year. But there was still times we could have won. And so that just keeps you driving and driving hard and pushing forward. But at the end of this season, I don't know, I wrote Steve an e mail and we talked a lot. And I just saw the progress that was being made in the final 10 races with how Steve's restructuring the engineering and the team and his efforts. And it just fired me up to want to do even more than I already was" Gordon said shortly after winning. "And when you have that, you just have a great team that works well together, believes in one another, and all we were missing was that victory. And I can't believe it happened here today at Texas. But, man, this is just even better than any other place. I think this is probably the best place we possibly could have won, because it's eluded us for so long, and to break the streak not only here at Texas, but over the last 40 whatever races, it's pretty cool and I'm real proud of this guy. He's worked his tail off to get us here. And this was an incredible team effort today."
Gordon now has a win at every track on the current Cup schedule except for Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Jeff Gordon won by .542 seconds ahead of his teammate Jimmie Johnson. Johnson's 5th top-10 finish of the season and 9th top-10 @ Texas.
Greg Biffle led a combined (second-best) 93 laps and his teammate, Matt Kenseth led for 55 laps. With 39 laps to go, Carl Edwards took the lead from Jeff Gordon. After leading 9 laps, a spin by David Stremme brought out the final caution of the race. Edwards' crew had problems changing tires which caused Edwards to lose 10 spots on pit road. We know races can be won or lost on pit road. Edwards finished 10th with Greg Biffle - 3rd and Kenseth - 5th.
Kyle Busch didn't fare as well as during the cup race after winning the Nationwide Series race the day before. Kyle struggled to get back on the lead lap through much of the race. He finished 18th and as the first driver one lap down.
There were 6 cautions for 30 laps and a new track record of 28 lead changes among 14 drivers:
D. Reutimann 0; J. Gordon 1-7; D. Reutimann 8-46; M. Kenseth 47-50; D. Reutimann 51; T. Stewart 52; Kyle Busch 53-54; M. Kenseth 55-87; T. Stewart 88-98; M. Kenseth 99-116; G. Biffle 117-152; J. Gordon 153; D. Ragan 154; Kurt Busch 155; M. Martin 156; G. Biffle 157-208; T. Stewart 209-211; J. Gordon 212; M. Martin 213-214; J. Johnson 215; P. Menard 216; G. Biffle 217-221; J. Gordon 222-252; D. Earnhardt Jr. 253-258; J. Gordon 259-295; C. Edwards 296-304; T. Stewart 305; B. Vickers 306; J. Gordon 307-334.
For complete (unofficial) results, click here.
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