Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon, longtime teammates for Hendrick Motorsports, hold between them a total of eight NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championships. The two NASCAR heavyweights have dominated the Cup Series for the last decade, with Johnson slowly replacing Gordon as the leader on the scoreboard over the last few years. This year, Gordon and Johnson are side-by-side when it comes to racing supremacy, and their evenness on the track has caused the two drivers to bump heads (almost literally) more than once.
Gordon and Johnson, two of the biggest names in NASCAR, have recently been in the news because of on-track scuffles, mostly in the form of words exchanged after their cars collided in two separate races. The first incident between the Hendrick teammates happened on April 19 at Texas, when Gordon got under Johnson and nudged him up the track. Johnson reacted by veering to the left, hitting Gordon’s door panel and cutting his left tire.
The incident was enough to put a damper on Gordon’s day, and No. 24 ended up in 31st place at the end of the race. Johnson went on to finish second, further leaving a bitter taste in Gordon’s mouth. After the Texas race, Gordon showed emotion but chalked it all up to racing hard, telling ESPN, “When you have a car like I had today, you’re not teammates or friends. You’ve just got to race hard. I’m disappointed, but I’ll get over it and so will he. We’ll talk about it. It’s the competitors coming out in us, not anything against one another.”
Patching things up, Johnson and Gordon seemed to have overcome the small hurdle that provided heated action at Texas, but the next week’s race on April 25 in Talladega only sparked a new rift between the two drivers. Just a week after the Texas incident, Johnson and Gordon got tangled up again at the Aaron’s 499 in ‘Dega. Gordon suffered a setback for the second week in a row at Johnson’s expense, this time being the victim of a run-in that happened five laps down from the finish.
On Lap 183 of the race, Johnson abruptly crossed lanes and cut off Gordon, causing him to check up and fall back. Keeping his car in control, however, Gordon continued on, only to get clipped by a wreck just seconds later. Ultimately finishing in 22nd place (Johnson wound up in 31st after a later accident with Greg Biffle), Gordon again got heated when talking to the media after the race.
Talking to NASCAR.com, Gordon said, “The 48 is testing my patience, I can tell you that. It takes a lot to make me mad – and I am pissed right now. I got a huge hit of momentum and I was gone. We were going to drive by a bunch of cars – but then the 48 decided to change three lanes and keep me from going by him. That’s just not cool when a car is going that much faster than you. Maybe he just didn’t know. But we’ll take what we can get out of here and move on to the next one.”
Heated rivalries are part of what sells <a href=”http://www.stubhub.com/nascar-tickets/”>NASCAR tickets</a> on a regular basis, but racing fans shouldn’t hold their breaths in hopes of seeing Jimmie Johnson and teammate Jeff Gordon get physical on the track for much longer. Above all, Johnson and Gordon are two of the most prolific drivers on the NASCAR circuit, and while both racing icons take some time to cool off following melees at Texas and Talladega, the teammates will likely chalk it all up to heat-of-the-moment racing and continue to shake hands with each other as the 2010 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series continues. What’s to come of the Johnson-Gordon saga? It could be over before it ever even started.
Jenna Jay wrote this article, which is sponsored by StubHub.com. <a href=”http://www.stubhub.com/”>StubHub</a> is a leader in the business of selling <a href=”http://www.stubhub.com/nascar-tickets/”>NASCAR tickets</a>, sports tickets, concert tickets, theater tickets and special events tickets.
