NASCAR Notebook: Gordon's recent slump has not cut lead much

¦ Many believe that Jeff Gordon is all but a shoo-in for the Nextel Cup championship, but Jeff Gordon has suddenly started to look a bit vulnerable as NASCAR heads to California this weekend.

Jeff Gordon has just had a little fluky bad luck the last couple of weeks, but it still hasn’t done much to diminish his overwhelming points lead, which is well over 300 points.

Jeff Gordon’s season started well, with a second-place run at California Speedway, then three wins and nine top fives over the next 10 races.

Even with his hiccups, Jeff Gordon leads the tour standings by 349 over Tony Stewart, and he also leads in poles, with six; top-five finishes, with 14; top 10s, with 20; and he has both the best average finish (7th) and the best average start (11th).

¦ Matt Kenseth won at California Speedway in the spring, exploiting good pit spots.

“Coming off a disappointing weekend at Bristol, it’s definitely good to be going to a track you feel you can run well at,” Matt Kenseth said. “We’re locked into the Chase now, and that feels good and all. But we’ve got to start running better and build some momentum.

“Of course, last year we had all the momentum in the world heading into the Chase and couldn’t get it done once in the Chase. So momentum isn’t everything.

“But we still want to score some good finishes in these next two races and get our cars running the best we can for those final 10.”

¦ California Speedway is a copy of the Michigan two-mile track, but Michael Waltrip said that the two tracks, though they may look identical, have much different personalities.

“Michigan reminds me of a superspeedway - it has long, sweeping turns,” Waltrip said. “But from the first time I drove at California, it felt like a big short track. You fly down into the corner and then dive for the bottom. You can run high, but it just seems as if the turns are not banked as much as Michigan or as sweeping.

“You get more of a short-track feel to it.”

Waltrip has had quite a year, this his first season as a car owner. He hasn’t quite turned the corner, but he does see daylight.

“Any time we can get two Cup cars in the race, that means we are learning,” Waltrip said, referring to last week’s race at Bristol. “We weren’t able to learn a whole lot at the start of the season because our qualifying efforts were so sporadic. Now that’s not the case. We are showing some consistency.

“So I am hoping our race results will start to improve.”

¦ Jeff Burton ran well at California in the spring, finishing fourth, but the Labor Day race is quite a different creature.

“California is a fairly slick track, not a track with a tremendous amount of grip,” Jeff Burton said. “What will end up happening is you’ll slide around a little bit during the day, and when it gets darker and the track cools down, there will be more grip.”

The Sunday race is almost a doubleheader for teams, and the setting sun can be a big factor for the final 30 minutes of daylight, because it hits drivers smack in the windshield down the backstretch.

“When you are going down the backstretch at close to 200 mph and you can’t see anything, there’s not a driver out there that likes driving at that particular time,” Dale Jarrett said. “You can’t adjust to it. You’re literally blinded by the sun for at least a 35 to 45-minute time frame. And it’s just not a good time.

“You do as much as you can with tape and your shield … but you need to be able to see out of the windshield. And you literally can’t see anything.”

¦ Kevin Harvick opened the year with a dramatic win in the Daytona 500, and he was poised for a second win at California, until a tire blew on a late restart.

“If the race stayed green, we wouldn’t have had debris from the wreck and the tire doesn’t go flat, and things would have been very different,” Kevin Harvick said.

“However, we just came off winning the Daytona 500, so there really wasn’t much that was going to ruin our party.

“I mean things like this are going to happen. We have been the victim of this a lot in 2007, and have been able to stay in contention for the Chase. I think that shows the maturity of our team.”

Kevin Harvick and teammate Jeff Burton are in no serious danger of falling out of the Chase. The top 12 are pretty much locked in, with two races until the cut.

Jeff Burton, like Kevin Harvick, would like to get back some momentum before the Chase.

“So I feel good about the tracks we’re going to,” Jeff Burton said. “But so do a lot of other drivers. There’s nobody in the Chase you can look at and say they don’t run good at those tracks.”

See more at www.journalnow.com