CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Ask Jeff Gordon the race he most wants to win this season and it’s not the answer most fans would expect.It’s not the Daytona 500, the Brickyard 400, the Coca-Cola 600 or the Bristol night race. While Gordon would still love to win one of those elite events, he starts his wish list with a newer race on the Sprint Cup Series schedule.“I’d like to win at Kentucky, and I’d like to be more of a threat to win a championship,” the four-time champion said recently at the NASCAR Sprint Media Tour about what he wants to accomplish this season.“That’s my biggest list. I go out every weekend trying to win the race. That’s on everybody’s checklist, but to me, it’s being in contention to go to Homestead with a shot at it. I like being competitive. My checklist is whatever it takes to be competitive.”Kentucky might be a surprise answer for the race Gordon wants to win the most, but the reasoning behind it is simple. It’s the only track on the Sprint Cup Series where Gordon is yet to score a victory. It would be something he would love to check off after 88 career wins, third on NASCAR’s all-time list.“It’s definitely a big focus,” said Gordon, driver of the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet. “It would be a big accomplishment before they add another race to say that we had won at every track. It’s a goal to win everywhere, but when there is only one where you haven’t won at, it’s an attainable goal.”He could see teammate Jimmie Johnson as another driver who could finish his career with wins at every track which NASCAR races on. For Gordon, last season produced just one victory at Martinsville. It is a season which was good in the fact he was a championship contender late in the season.But, he also sees places where the No. 24 team fell short. A lot of the blame he puts on himself.“We look at things that we could have done better and things we could have improved on,” Gordon said. “We look at the missed opportunities, if it’s a restart or it’s a set-up, whatever it may be. As a driver, I’m looking at what I could have done better. That’s one thing I’m really focused on this year is trying to improve my restarts. My restarts have been terrible and I don’t want to be known for bad restarts.”Gordon said a positive is the working relationship between he and crew chief Alan Gustafson. The 42-year-old driver believes he’s still one of the best at getting information to the team on how to adjust the car and he describes Gustafson as fantastic at setting up the race car.It wasn’t any major area where Gordon fell his team fell short during the 2013 season. In fact, they had a great stretch of races in the Chase until Texas where he finished 38th.Other occasions were even more frustrating to the driver, especially when teammate Kasey Kahne beat him on a restart at Pocono. Gordon felt aggravated with himself after that race. However, he’s been good over his two-decade-plus NASCAR career at moving on after such disappointment.He explains with 38 race weekends, a driver has to refocus and get ready for the next race.“I don’t care who it is, you beat yourself up if you feel you made a mistake and you didn’t get everything out of your performance that day,” he said. “One of the things I’ve been good at is I will beat myself up a day and a half or two days, then you try not to make the same mistake the next weekend.”
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