FONTANA, Calif. — You had to feel pretty good for the Auto Club Speedway Sunday, since something significant happened at the track that didn’t involve bad weather, paltry crowds or boring races — the usual stories.
Matt Kenseth made history. By taking the 500-mile race, he became the first driver since 1997 to win the Daytona 500, shake off the hangover and win again the next week.
Of course, Kenseth might have been just the man for the job. They say he’s so mild-mannered he makes Clark Kent look like Christian Bale. His only “hangover” last week would have been from excessive grinning.
“It was a great team, great victory and great engine,” said Kenseth, whose car, luckily, outperformed his use of superlatives.
Anyway, the last guy to snatch back-to-back wins to open the NASCAR season was some guy named Jeff Gordon.
Hmm, Gordon … Gordon. I remember that guy. Articulate, handsome, the marketing poster boy for the sport during its big popularity boom over the new millennium. Spent a few years winning championships and proving he wasn’t just a pretty face.
Whatever happened to him?
As it turned out, Gordon spent most of Sunday revisiting glory days. He hasn’t won a race since 2007, and he spent the past two seasons as Pau Gasol to Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jimmie Johnson’s Kobe Bryant, watching as Johnson collected a pair of driver championships.
“Getting beat and not liking it,” is how Gordon described his recent NASCAR experience. Sunday it was as if he came out of retirement.
In between occasional raindrops, and four not-so-bad weather cautions, the Auto Club 500 was a series of intriguing two-man battles, and Gordon was part of every one of them — Johnson-Gordon, Gordon-Greg Biffle and, finally, Kenseth-Gordon.
Gordon led 64 laps Sunday and ended up 1.464 seconds off Kenseth’s bumper. The one-time superstar finished 13th at Daytona, but he ran better than that most of the day, and at least leaves Fontana feeling relevant again.
As for Gordon’s other teammate, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., it was Auto Club Speedway deja vu — another bad day to add to his California collection. Even with his legions of fans blowing on his car as it goes by, Junior and Fontana remain bitter enemies. He started 35th, climbed more than 20 places — without triggering even one 10-car wreck — then dropped out on lap 206 after suffering engine troubles, he said, for the first time as a Hendrick driver.
“I hope it’s just an anomaly,” Earnhardt told the TV people, no doubt leaving half of NASCAR Nation wondering where in the engine the “anomaly” goes.
By the end, the race was good enough that Kyle Busch’s third-place finish was just a footnote — not a ruined story line. He missed his “hat trick” after winning the two Saturday races.
Said Busch of Kenseth and Gordon: “I had the best seat in the house. Those guys put on a show.”
They did that, meaning the race actually succeeded. That is, there were no rain delays and no overbearing heat. The crowd was significantly better than the dire predictions of 50,000. And even track president Gillian Zucker could say she made the right choice when asked if she had Tivo’d the Oscars.
“I TiVo’d the race, so I can see it later,” she said.
Hope no one told her who won.
(Contact Gregg Patton at gpattonPE.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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