"It surprises me," Gordon said. "Not only did I feel like we could win this year, but I thought we could battle for the championship. Anytime you come off the season like we had last year, you've got confidence coming in that you're going to do it again or battle for it."
Instead of trying to win a season championship, after finishing as the runner-up to Hendrick teammate Jimmie Johnson last year, Gordon is just trying to win a race.
The first opportunity comes Sunday at Texas, one of the two active tracks where the four-time Sprint Cup champion with 81 race victories has never won. And where Gordon has the only last-place finishes in his 542 career races -- last April, and in 1999.
"I know it's a very challenging racetrack," he said.
Gordon did OK on Friday, where he was the quickest in practice and then earned his first pole at the 11/2-mile high-banked Texas track. Gordon started his No. 24 Chevrolet first in the 2007 spring race after qualifying was rained out.
Since 1994, Gordon has had multiple victories each season and won his four Cup titles between 1995 and 2001.
"I'll take a winless season if that means that the work we're doing now will pay off for us down the road for next season and puts us in position to win multiple races and battle for the championship," he said.
Gordon still has a good chance to be part of a third straight Cup title because he is the co-owner of Johnson's No. 48 car. Johnson has a 183-point lead over Carl Edwards.
"If I can't win it, I certainly want to support Jimmie and those guys at Hendrick," he said. "I'm excited to be a part of it, but it's not the same as doing it in my own car."
After Texas, there are races remaining at Phoenix and Homestead, the other track where Gordon hasn't won.
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STAYING HOME: It looks like Mark Martin won't get an early start on driving the No. 5 Chevrolet after all.
Martin will move from Dale Earnhardt Inc. to Hendrick Motorsports next season, taking over the No. 5 from Casey Mears, who is moving to Richard Childress Racing.
It appeared last week that both of them would debut with their new teams at the Cup finale at Homestead. But Martin said Friday that the deal fell through and Phoenix next week will be his last race in the No. 8 DEI car.
"I'll be on the couch for Homestead with the remote," Martin said. "I won't be driving at Homestead, and as far as I know, I won't even be visiting."
Martin said he made himself available to Hendrick, making sure his obligations to DEI were wrapped up at Phoenix. But the veteran racer said Childress was unable to work out a way to get Mears into a fourth RCR entry for Homestead.
"It didn't work out on the other side for Casey," Martin said. "The details didn't quite line up."
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TOO LONG, TOO LATE: When the NFL season is done, Dale Earnhardt Jr. is like so many other football fans.
"The season ends before you want it to," Earnhardt said Friday. "You get just enough to get excited and then it's all over and there's such a long wait."
With a 36-race Cup schedule that runs February through mid-November, Earnhardt believes NASCAR is instead like baseball, hockey and other sports with long seasons.
"There's lulls and inactivity between the fan and the sport itself at times," he said. "There's no way to fix that."
Earnhardt remembers when the racing season was two months shorter, a 28-race schedule long before the inception of the Chase for the Sprint Cup. But he knows NASCAR won't be returning to that kind of setup.
"The sport was giving you just enough to get really excited about the next season," he said. "We've already passed the point of no return. There's no way we would change what we really already have here."
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VAULT FOR TROOPS: Mark Martin will be sporting camouflage at Texas, a special paint scheme on his No. 8 U.S. Army Chevrolet as part of a program to send handwritten messages to U.S. troops this holiday season.
The "Honoring the Uniform: Calling for Support" initiative replicates a popular service previously operated by the U.S. Department of Defense. Before being discontinued after 17 years in 2003 because of security concerns, mail could be addressed to "any service member."
Now pre-addressed postcards can be found on special camouflage-themed 12-packs of VAULT drinks. The postcards can then be dropped in the mail and will arrive at a USO collection center for security screening before being distributed to troops.
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SPARKPLUGS: Jeff Burton, Jeff Gordon, Bobby Labonte and Mark Martin are the only drivers who started all 15 Cup races at Texas. Each will make it 16 on Sunday. ... Since Texas got a fall race three years ago, the winner has always been the same driver that won the previous week at Atlanta, another 11/2-mile track owned by Bruton Smith. Carl Edwards won last week at Atlanta, like he did three years ago before winning the Dickies 500. Tony Stewart (2006) and Jimmie Johnson (2007) were the other Atlanta-Texas winners.
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