WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. – Jeff Gordon knew something wasn’t quite right.
When the driver brought his No. 24 Axalta Chevrolet SS to pit road on Lap 24 at Watkins Glen International, he relayed that he had encountered some problems with the brakes.
But as he returned to the track, everything appeared to be OK. Until a caution flag waved just two laps later, and it became clear that fluid was leaking from the No. 24 Chevy.
“We had a brake line issue,” Gordon explained. “It wasn’t broken. It’s not like I hit anything or something came into it and broke it that we can see. Something went bad with the line and it started leaking fluid and we started losing brakes. So we had to come in. Unfortunately, it took us four laps to get that changed. It’s just so hard to make up laps when you get that many down, especially at a track like this.”
Gordon kept working, but ultimately finished 41st. It came just two weeks after the driver settled for a 42nd-place result in his final Brickyard 400 due to being caught up in an early-race incident.
But sandwiched in between was a third-place finish at Pocono Raceway. And before the Indianapolis Motor Speedway incident, Gordon had strung together three consecutive top-10 finishes.
“We need to improve slightly performance-wise, but I think our performance is not bad,” he said. “Right now it is the unknown. It is the concerns of freak things happening like what happened to us at Indy, what happened to us here. Those are things out of your control. We are all about the things you can control and from that standpoint we are just trying to improve the performance of the car slightly. We are not far off, though.”
With four races remaining until the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup, Gordon is still in the thick of the battle to join the Challenger 16.
But he knows that “freak” incidents or not, the No. 24 team can’t afford many more results like Sunday’s if it wants to join NASCAR’s postseason.
“I have no idea where we are right now in points or how all that worked out, but just when you think you get something that is going to go your way, something like this happens,” Gordon said. “We just keep fighting and digging and try to get the finishes that we need to get ourselves solidly in there.”