Event Preview Fact SheetEvent/Date: Sirius Satellite Radio 400/June 15, 2003 Venue: Michigan International Speedway Robby Gordon’s NASCAR Winston Cup Performance History at Michigan International Speedway Laps Completed/Date Start Finish Total Laps Status Money 8/18/02 5 21 200/200 Running $74,046 6/16/02 35 33 197/200 Running 67,646 8/20/00 43 34 177/200 Accident 22,080 6/11/00 25 28 193/194 Running 23,840 8/17/97 29 17 200/200 Running 29,665 6/19/94 38 38 69/200 Running 7,965 TOTALS Avg. Start: 29.16 Avg. Finish: 28.5 Laps: 1,036/1,194 Money: $225,242 NASCAR Winston Cup Points Position: 15th NOTES:
ROBBY GORDON QUOTES: On Pocono: "Pocono was pretty much a disaster for the Cingular Wireless team. We had worked so hard and gotten into the top 10 and then turned around and ran like that. We started out the race and realized we had the wrong gear for third gear because the car just wouldn't go in third. But our bigger problem came when the motor started misfiring. It did it for a long time, got better, did it again and so forth. It really hurt our speed and made us very slow. But when it stabilized, the car was pretty fast. I thought we had a motor issue Friday during qualifying but everything seemed to check out okay before the race. The car’s balance was good, though. We'll just have to get past this and look ahead to Michigan, no matter how disappointed we are. We have a great race team and we’ve proved that. We just had an off weekend and hopefully that is the last one for a while.” On Michigan: “I don’t have a lot of experience at Michigan in a Winston Cup car, but when you start getting some track time at a certain speedway, you begin to learn what lines you can run. Michigan has a few different lines and not everyone runs the same line. The line we run this weekend will depend on what the Cingular Wireless Chevrolet is capable of doing. That will give us a car that can set up and pass other cars, or drive deep into the corner when needed, or back off the gas early and get down to the bottom of the track to pass the other guys. There are many opportunities to pass at Michigan but you’ve got to have the car capable of doing it or you just play ‘follow-the-leader’ for 400 miles. “Horsepower is going to be very important this weekend at Michigan. You’ve got to have enough ‘oomph’ in the motor to get you off those corners but at the same time, you don’t want to kill the motor and end up having to change it before the weekend ends, or worse, blow the motor during the race and end up with a bad finish. I’m very confident in Spenny Clendenen and Danny Lawrence and all the guys in the RCR engine department because they’ve done a heck of a job this year.
“The Cingular team thought we’d come out of last year’s June race at Michigan with a top-10 finish after starting fifth. But after the weather changed from the day before, the car was too tight most of the day, despite what Kevin Hamlin and the guys did to correct it. We set ourselves up for a fuel strategy near the end and ran in the second position for a while. But we had much older tires than anyone else and just couldn’t hold off those guys in the closing laps. But we stayed in the top 10 until 10 laps remaining but just didn’t have enough to hang in there. “We’ve put more emphasis on race setup than qualifying trim the past few races. The main reason for that has been bad weather on Saturdays when we have expected to not get Happy Hour in. At Charlotte, I knew I was going to start from the back anyway because I was going to miss the drivers’ meeting. It’s a lot easier to race inside the top 10 all day if you start there, but if you don’t have an opportunity to run any race setups, like we had happen again at Pocono last week, you can afford to start in the back and try to march forward during the race. That’s not to say that our qualifying package is right on target now because we have a lot of work to do. But our qualifying efforts don’t really reflect how good or bad a car we’ve had recently. “Michigan is a very smooth and wide track that usually lends itself to lots of three and four-wide racing during the day. Guys do it in the turns and down the front straightaway. There is a lot of track space at Michigan that is suitable for racing. It’s not like a lot of tracks where you know better than to race on the high groove. “Another thing about Michigan is that the race often comes down to nothing but fuel mileage and who got the best fuel mileage and did the right things with it. Michigan doesn’t usually have many caution periods, especially from about the halfway mark to the end of the race. Especially since the race tends to go green for a long time, we’re always trying to figure out exactly how many laps we can go on fuel to hopefully put ourselves in contention to be up front in the end. More often than not, if you don’t have good fuel mileage strategy at Michigan, you can’t win there.”
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