Race/Date: Dodge/Save Mart 350/June 22, 2003
(16th of 36 races)
Location: Infineon Speedway/Sonoma, Calif.
Start Position: Second
Finish Position: First
Points Position: 13th (picked up three spots and 58 points out of 10th)

Race Recap:
Robby Gordon drove the No. 31 Cingular Wireless Chevrolet to the sponsor’s first NASCAR Winston Cup points-race victory in dominating fashion in the Dodge/Save Mart 350 at Infineon Speedway in Sonoma, Calif.

Gordon started on the outside of the front row and took the lead on the second lap. He and RCR teammate Kevin Harvick soon hooked up and ran first and second on the 11-turn road course in the Northern California wine country. On lap 58 coming into the tight hairpin of turn 11, Harvick dove under Gordon for the lead but was carrying too much speed and pushed both cars out of the racing groove. That allowed third-place Ron Fellows to take the lead.

Being near the end of a fuel run on lap 65 and thinking a full course caution might come out for a car that spun at turn 7, Gordon and Harvick dove into the pits. The caution didn’t come out until lap 71 and Gordon took advantage of the rule allowing the drivers to race back to the yellow and passed Harvick in turn 11. Gordon came out of the pits in fifth place and Harvick in sixth so the two RCR teams were set up to challenge for the lead when the race returned to green on lap 75.

Gordon did just that on lap 79. He was challenged for the lead late in the race by Jeff Gordon but Robby said after the race that he was merely setting his pace in the Cingular Wireless Chevrolet by how fast Jeff was going.

Gordon led 50 of the first 65 laps and 81 of the race’s 110, including the final 32, to earn his second NASCAR Winston Cup victory. His other victory came in November 2001 at New Hampshire International Speedway in RCR’s No. 31 Chevrolet.

The victory was RCR’s 74th in NASCAR Winston Cup competition and its third road course win. Its first-ever series win came in 1983 at the now-closed Riverside (Calif.) International Raceway with driver Ricky Rudd. The other victory came in 1995 at Watkins Glen (N.Y.) International with the late Dale Earnhardt.

Robby Gordon Quotes:

YOU’VE SAID YOU LET ONE SLIP AWAY HERE IN 2001, BUT YOU DIDN’T LET THIS ONE SLIP AWAY.
"I’m going to date it all the way back to 2000. We’ve been the quickest car since about then, and we haven’t pulled the car into Victory Lane. In 2001, we came real close, and then last year, I was running second to Tony [Stewart] and we stuck with Tony’s strategy and we knew at that point that we made a mistake we were never going to be able to recover from and we finished 11th. Track position is key here, and we had to use every obstacle we could to gain as much track position as we could and our fuel mileage to make it run full distance."

YOU SAID YOU HAD A PLAN YOU WERE GOING TO EXECUTE. HOW DID THAT GO?
"Our plan was to come in between laps 26 and 36, to make our first stop. We dictated our stops under green strategy and we didn’t come in under any yellows. We knew that would take us to lap 68, and if we could get to lap 68 and be the first car on the road we could run from there home. We lived by that strategy and that paid off for us. We just had a really good car all day long."

JEFF GORDON SAID THAT YOU WON THIS ONE BY PASSING KEVIN HARVICK UNDER YELLOW.
"I sat and asked [NASCAR], and it was very obvious in the driver’s meeting today, I asked ‘Are you sure we can pass under the yellow?’ They said, ‘yeah, you can race back to the line, just like every weekend.’ Kevin Harvick may be mad at me, but it is what it is. To be honest with you, when he got by me, he wasn’t going to make the corner if I didn’t move out of the way. He would have wrecked me. Ron Fellows got under both of us there. He took a shot at risking it, and I paid him back under a caution."

YOU HIT THE TIRE BARRIER UP THERE. WHAT HAPPENED? "I was just using the whole race track. I knew that was foam and I knew it wasn’t going to hurt me. The biggest thing here is we had to save our tires and pace ourselves. I actually paced myself off Jeff Gordon. There was no damage, other than a little wrinkle on the left front. On a road course, we don’t go fast enough to make much downforce difference. Every lap I tried to miss it [the barrier] by an inch, and I was an inch off one time."

DID YOU ALMOST FEEL THAT THIS WAS YOUR RACE TO LOSE?
"Not only here, we’ve been strong many times this year. The team has been good and we were in the top 10 a couple weeks ago. We knew if we put back the last couple of weeks, we could probably jump ourselves back up toward the front again. We knew we needed to come here-I think I said it three weeks ago in Charlotte-we were going to come here and score maximum points. That was our game plan. We just missed it by one spot in qualifying back to the flag."

TALK A LITTLE MORE ABOUT RACING BACK TO THE YELLOW FLAG.
"Jeff Gordon sat in the same driver’s meeting I did. I asked the question three times and disrupted the driver’s meeting because I wanted to make sure I understood exactly what they were saying. They said, ‘under waving yellow, you can race back to the line until you take the yellow. After you take the yellow at the start/finish line, that’s what it is.’ I can’t help that I understood exactly what the rules were and took advantage of it. Racing here at Sonoma, it’s very hard to pass. You hear about on all the ovals the aero push, and you get it here too. I knew if I could get track position, we were definitely going to be the car to beat."

ON THE RADIO DURING THE RACE, YOU SAID YOU THOUGHT YOU HAD A TIRE GOING DOWN. WHAT REALLY HAPPENED WITH THAT?
"I got a little nervous, because under the caution, we were conserving as much fuel as possible because we stuck to our lap-68 plan. I didn’t scuff my tires because it takes energy to scuff tires. So I probably got some buildup on my tires and it just slid around for two or three laps on the tires. The key was, I didn’t want to run out of fuel later, and I probably should have scuffed them a couple of turns before we went back to green. But I thought that saving fuel was more important at that point."

JEFF GORDON WAS PRETTY MUCH ON YOUR BUMPER FOR THE LAST 15 LAPS. WAS HE MAKING YOU RUN A LITTLE FASTER THAN YOU WANTED TO?
"I actually backed my car up to his front bumper, because what I didn’t know was, at the pace we were running, if he was saving his tires and was going to make a last-lap run at me. I paced off his front bumper. I knew if I kept about three or four car lengths between us going into the hairpin, there was no way he could actually get to my bumper and knock me loose going into Turn 11."

HOW NICE WAS IT TO GIVE KEVIN HAMLIN SUCH A WONDERFUL WEDDING GIFT
(Cingular Wireless crew chief Kevin Hamlin was married Thursday in Napa, Calif.)? "It was great. Kevin has been working real hard getting this program turned around. He’s had some stressful times the last couple of years, and it’s just great that I could put a car in Victory Lane for the second time this year with him and prove that he’s still a good crew chief. What Kevin has been doing is, he’s been allowing Chris Andrews, my engineer, and myself to get a little bit on the wild side as far as setups and his experience keeps us back inside the lines. The three of us have been working real well on getting involved in the car and he had a plan this weekend where he let me and Chris worry about the setup on the car and he would worry more about how the strategy was going to work out and help us in that fashion. I think it really worked out well. If we continue in this direction, we’re all going to be in real good shape."