Cingular Wireless Racing

Event Preview Fact Sheet

 

Event/Date:       Subway 500/Oct. 19, 2003

Venue:  Martinsville (Va.) Speedway

 Robby Gordon’s NASCAR Winston Cup Performance History at Martinsville Speedway

Date	Start	Finish	Laps Completed/ Total Laps	Status	Money
04/13/03	38	21	499/500	Running	$75,262
10/20/02	12	23	498/500	Running	66,631
04/14/02	11	34	481/500	Vibration	65,611
10/14/01	28	38	442/500	Running	61,799
04/09/00	42	40	425/500	Rear End	21,650
04/20/97	40	41	395/500	Accident	7,075

 TOTALS              Avg. Start: 28.5       Avg. Finish: 32.83         Laps: 2,740/3,000        Money: $298,028

 NASCAR Winston Cup Points Position: 15th

 NOTES:

 ROBBY GORDON QUOTES:

“Martinsville is a great track because the racing is so tight and the quarters so close.  Bristol and Martinsville are often two of the best races of the year because we’re all cramped up in such a small space on the track for 500 laps.  It’s hard not to let your emotions get the best of you when you’ve got guys beating and banging on you all day.  Your patience is just about shot by the end.  Not only do drivers have to control their race cars for 500 laps at Martinsville, they’ve got to control their tempers for 500 laps.  Sometimes that is the biggest challenge of all. 

 “I compare the turns at Martinsville to the hairpin turn on the road course at Sonoma, except you’re turning right at Sonoma.  Martinsville is like two hairpin turns in a row that make up an oval.  Martinsville’s got the sharpest and flattest corners on the circuit.  Martinsville seems like it’s smaller than Bristol, although it isn’t, because the track is so flat and before you know it, you’re back at the same, sharp corner again. 

“I think the flat tracks are very good for me and they’re a lot like road racing.  We’ve run fairly decent the last couple of times at Martinsville but haven’t come out with really good finishes.  We were one of the quickest cars in Happy Hour there last October and ran second for a while.  But we made the decision to follow leader Tony Stewart into the pits during a caution and no one else pitted with us.  That put us in 19th behind a bunch of traffic and the car got tight behind that many cars.  We struggled the rest of the day and ended up 23rd.  We know what we need for the set-up on the car this year.  We just need to make sure we make smart calls on pit road all day that put us where we need to be and the car will hopefully be strong enough to stay up front and be there at the end.  

 “The Cingular Wireless team has fallen into some sort of a slump the past month or two and we’re not really sure why.  We’ve gone from contending for eighth or so in the points to 15th and that’s just not good enough.  We’ve been working hard but we’re going to try to figure out what the problem is and then the heat up a notch or two and put our minds to getting back into the top 10 within the next five weeks.  That has been our goal all year long and we need to jump on it now before it’s too late.  We haven’t given up on that goal.”