Jeff Gordon: NASCAR’s Chase Should Include Road Course Race

Nine of Jeff Gordon’s 84 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series victories have come at road courses – four at Watkins Glen, five at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma.

So perhaps it’s no surprise the four-time Cup champ believes a road course race should find its way into NASCAR’s championship Chase.

“I’ve always said that in order to make the championship fully complete and find out the true best team and driver, the only thing that I think we’re missing in the Chase right now is a road course,” Gordon said Friday at Watkins Glen. “I feel like the Chase has about everything right now from short tracks to superspeedways to intermediates, so I think it’s pretty complete right now. But if you wanted to look at just one little thing that was missing, it would be a road course.”

Gordon said with the way road course action has been ever since NASCAR introduced double-file restarts, he believed “the fans would be for it as well.”

“I could see one in there,” he said.

But at least for now, NASCAR president Mike Helton doesn’t feel the same way. He said there’s no discussion about a road course in the Chase “as we sit here today.”

“We still maintain the thought process when we introduced the Chase that we were not going to shuffle tracks around to adapt to the Chase,” he said Friday. “However that might work out in the future – if (a track owner) comes to us and asks to change stuff around, we’ll have to take a look at it and consider it. There’s nothing on the table today.”

In addition, Helton added, “We wouldn’t stack tracks up for the benefit of the Chase” because the Chase should stand on its own.