Forget winning, just be consistent

Jeff Gordon has not won a NASCAR Spint Cup Series race in 2008. The Hendrick Motorsports drivers have combined to win three Cup races this year. This from a team that won half, 18, of the Cup races last year.
He has won four Cup races at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana in his career, but his last came in 2004. Gordon's last win in any Cup race came on Oct. 13 at Lowe's Motor Speedway in North Carolina.
"It's been a little bit frustrating and disappointing," Gordon said. "We want to win. We want to be competitive. We came off such a great year last year. Our team has been phenomenal this year, we just haven't had the runs, haven't had the cars and when we did have the cars haven't been able to put it all together. So that's definitely been frustrating."
He's one of five drivers in Chase contention without a win. Gordon is ninth in the Sprint Cup Series standings with nine top-five finishes. Gordon said it's more important to put up consistent finishes than win races.
"A victory all that does is calm the media down," Gordon said. "That's all that does. A win is just to try to keep our streak going and those type of things. To me it's not about a win, it's about consistently running up front, leading laps. This is a perfect example, this race track. When we lead a lap here we're usually in the top-five. That's fairly typical for us so it's about being competitive enough to get up there and lead laps. When we lead laps we do very well."
Gordon qualified third for Sunday's Pepsi 500.