NATIONAL GUARD JOINS THE NO. 24 TEAM: This season, Gordon and the No. 24 team are helping to bring awareness to the National Guard’s community initiatives, which will be showcased on the No. 24 DuPont/National Guard Chevrolet in eight Sprint Cup Series events. In addition to this weekend at Richmond, Gordon will partner with the National Guard at two other venues: New Hampshire Motor Speedway on Sept. 20 and Martinsville Speedway on Oct. 25.
QUOTES
JEFF GORDON, DRIVER, NO. 24 DUPONT/NATIONAL GUARD WOUNDED WARRIOR CHEVROLET (ON RECOGNIZING WOUNDED WARRIORS ON THE CAR THIS WEEKEND.): “I’m proud to honor all the Wounded Warriors out there on our DuPont/National Guard Chevy this weekend at Richmond. It’s great knowing the National Guard has a program in place that provides an injured or ill soldier with the proper medical and personal assistance they need to return to their families.”
GORDON (ON WHY HE’S BEEN SUCCESSFUL THIS SEASON.): “I feel like our sport is just such a huge team sport. Everybody has to contribute on the team to the cars being well prepared; communication is so important among all those members of the team, and we’re constantly trying to think of ways to be better at making the cars stronger, lighter and faster, obviously. And my role is (to figure out) what can I do to change my line, to change how I drive the car, to find just those little small things so that I’m contributing just like every other person on the team. But I feel like (crew chief) Steve Letarte has done a great job utilizing the engineering that we have at Hendrick Motorsports and being a great leader. I think that you’ve got to give him a lot of credit. Confidence could have very easily gotten down last year because we didn’t have a great season, and we’ve come back in 2009 really, really strong.”
STEVE LETARTE, CREW CHIEF, NO. 24 DUPONT/NATIONAL GUARD WOUNDED WARRIOR CHEVROLET (ON RETURNING TO RICHMOND.): “We’re excited to go back to Richmond. We felt as a team we almost had a shot at the pole (in May). We qualified second to the No. 83 car. We ran really well in the race, led a lot of laps. We were really aggressive on pit strategy, and it didn’t work out. We were stuck on old tires and finished eighth. We’re excited, though. We’re going to have the National Guard on board again. It seems like every time we run the silver and black paint scheme we run real well. We’re going to honor the Wounded Warriors on the car, and I think it’s going to be a great weekend. We’re going to run National Guard back-to-back at Richmond and Loudon. The one win we got this year was at Texas in that paint scheme. Hopefully we can get that car into Victory Lane again.”
LETARTE (ON APPLYING RICHMOND TO THE CHASE.): “Turns 1 and 2 at Phoenix are a lot like Richmond, and we struggled pretty severely at Phoenix earlier this year. Mark (Martin) won. He had a very good car. Jimmie (Johnson) had a very good car. We were OK, but we weren’t as good as we expected to be. But from Phoenix to Richmond, we improved a great deal so we think we’ve learned some stuff from Richmond, and we’re excited to apply that stuff to see if hopefully we can improve upon Phoenix.”
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