Brickyard 400 Notes And Quotes

NOT A GOOD DAY FOR GORDON: It didn’t end the way Jeff Gordon and his legions of fans hoped it would, but for the time being at least, there’s always next week. Gordon, who hoped to make it six Brickyard 400 wins, was caught up in a lap 50 restart shuffle with a spinning Clint Bowyer and hit the north short-chute wall; an impact that brought him into the pits several times for needed repairs. Gordon was forced to abandon the race on lap 66 and finished 42nd. Had he won today, he would have entered the record books as the winningest driver in IMS history with six Brickyard 400 victories, surpassing the five F1 wins recorded here by Michael Schumacher. “Some of the greatest memories of my life are here at Indianapolis, starting with the inaugural Brickyard 400. There were too many good ones to be overshadowed by a race like today.” And about the crash: “I don’t know. I was underneath Kasey Kahne and we were just racing for position. I saw Boyer get sideways,” explained Gordon. “I don’t know what caused it. Me and Kasey were trying to check up to avoid it. I don’t know if he got loose or we got loose together. Then I just lost control and got the wall.”

• Kyle Busch: “We are a championship winning team. We just have to get Chase eligible.” After today’s race win Busch is 32^nd in points and must jump into the top-30 prior to the Chase. He is currently 23 points out of 30^th.
• Ryan Newman started the race in last place and worked his way up to 11^th at the end.
• Kevin Harvick on the new race package and the heat in the car. “The cars are extremely hot inside. This was probably the biggest surprise that crept up on everybody. I know everybody spent a lot of money to get the cars here and put a lot of time and effort into putting the puzzle together. We had already come here and tested and spent that money to come here and test for a few days and then to come back and have to race something different was a huge undertaking…and a huge science project.”
• Matt Kenseth explained how the drivers figured out how to hold off the opposition. “It’s just so hard to pass at the end of the race. Everybody figured out how to keep the guy behind from passing…make it so they had to drive through your wake. Once they drive through your wake they almost spin out every time and lose five car-lengths immediately. As soon as it got single file, that was pretty much where you were going to finish unless somebody screwed up.”

• Third-place finisher Kevin Harvick leads the point standings by 69 points over Logano and by 100 over Dale Earnhardt Jr.
• This was Busch’s fourth victory and ninth top-10 finish since returning to the series after recovering from early-season injuries. It was his third straight win.
• A mad scramble to pit on lap 122 saw Carl Edwards’ Joe Gibbs crew get him out 9^th after an 11.5 second stop. Some crews felt they might be a few laps short before the end as rain has moved out of the area and a full race was likely. Several teams topped-off during a lap 141 caution.
• Overcast skies and 87 degree weather greeted race fans at the start of the 400, but rain was in the forecast.
• US World Cup winning soccer midfielder Lauren Holiday, an Indianapolis native, drove the Chevy SS Pace Car today; her first Indiana appearance since the Championship win. She admitted to being a fan of hometown driver Jeff Gordon.
• Ryan Blaney, disconsolate after losing the Xfinity race on the last lap here Saturday when his driving error gave the win to Kyle Busch, was back in the saddle today in the Motorcraft Wood Brothers Ford. The son of veteran driver Dave Blaney rebounded nicely and finished a strong 12^th. “I didn’t really sleep much last night. I was thinking about turn 2 over and over…There were some things that happened yesterday that I applied today and it worked out.”
• Some media members estimated the crowd at about 60,000, figuring one person in every fourth seat, which may be generous. If this figure is correct, it would possibly represent the smallest Brickyard crowd in the 22-year history of the event.
• The win was the first at the Brickyard for Toyota. The manufacturer had one at every other active Sprint Cup track. Chevrolet had won the previous 12 races at Indianapolis.
• Kevin Harvick finished third and led a race-high 75 laps. Pole sitter Carl Edwards led 20 laps and finished 13^th.

Paul Gohde

Paul Gohde heard the sound of race cars early in his life.

Growing up in suburban Milwaukee, just north of Wisconsin State Fair Park in the 1950’s, Paul had no idea what “that noise” was all about that he heard several times a year. Finally, through prodding by friends of his parents, he was taken to several Thursday night modified stock car races on the old quarter-mile dirt track that was in the infield of the one-mile oval -and he was hooked.

The first Milwaukee Mile event that he attended was the 1959 Rex Mays Classic won by Johnny Thomson in the pink Racing Associates lay-down Offy built by the legendary Lujie Lesovsky. After the 100-miler Gohde got the winner’s autograph in the pits, something he couldn’t do when he saw Hank Aaron hit a home run at County Stadium, and, again, he was hooked.

Paul began attending the Indianapolis 500 in 1961, and saw A. J. Foyt’s first Indy win. He began covering races in 1965 for Racing Wheels newspaper in Vancouver, WA as a reporter/photographer and his first credentialed race was Jim Clark’s historic Indy win.Paul has also done reporting, columns and photography for Midwest Racing News since the mid-sixties, with the 1967 Hoosier 100 being his first big race to report for them.

He is a retired middle-grade teacher, an avid collector of vintage racing memorabilia, and a tour guide at Miller Park. Paul loves to explore abandoned race tracks both here and in Europe, with the Brooklands track in Weybridge England being his favorite. Married to Paula, they have three adult children and two cats.

Paul loves the diversity of all types of racing, “a factor that got me hooked in the first place.”

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