Crew chief Alan Gustafson said his mistake late in Sunday’s race at Homestead-Miami Speedway cost #24-Jeff Gordon a chance to win. Gustafson discussed his late-race strategy Tuesday on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio’s ‘The Morning Drive.’ Gustafson told Gordon not pit during a caution 19 laps from the finish. The move kept Gordon first but with most of the field taking tires, it left him at a disadvantage. During the next caution a few laps later, Gordon pitted from second to get four new tires. He didn’t have time to recover. Gordon finished 10th despite leading a race-high 161 laps. So what happened?
‘Really, the error was made, I stayed out when the majority of the field pitted and that put us in a bad situation,’ Gustafson said of the caution 19 laps from the finish. ‘Jeff felt like (on the following caution) we weren’t in a very good position to succeed, so we made a decision to come pit. Really the first stop, when us and Denny (Hamlin) and ‘¦ a few other cars stayed out, that was the one that really hurt us. That’s on me. It was a mistake I made. I tried to keep the track position. I felt like that was going to be the highest percentage decision and it ended up not being. That put us behind unfortunately. I think we had the best car. The team deserved to win the race. It was a bad decision from my part and I’m going to learn from it. It would be really easy for me to make a lot of excuses and say, ‘Hey there’s a lot of circumstances that play into it – and there are and it is a very tough thing to do – but that’s my job and in that situation I feel like I didn’t do it to the best of my capabilities.’(MRN)(11-19-2014)
