ROBBY GORDON, No. 77 (Fifth in class and fifth overall four-wheel vehicle. Gordon clinched the Trophy-Truck season points championship.) About mile 490, I got by Rick (D. Johnson) and then we lost the brakes. We worked on it for a while. We lost the battle and won the war. It was a long day. It’s a very, very technical racecourse that Sal (Fish) built for us and it was very tough. I think I’d take a Tecate SCORE Baja 1000 win over a championship, to be honest with you. This race is tough. The car basically ran pretty good all day. We know where we got beat. We were running third on the road for a while and then I had a flat tire. When we changed it, we had to put one on the rack and when we were putting one on the rack, Andy (McMillin) went by. We knew we had to get back in front of Andy. He was only about two minutes in front of us and then I had another flat and then I got stuck behind (Nick) Vanderwey. I’m not going to say he held us up but Andy was able to get a clear run in there and he put 10 minutes on us pretty quickly. The rest of the time, we kind of just hung about 10-15 minutes back, depending on what traffic I had. The only way we were going to win (the race) was if everybody else broke. There was no reason for us to run any harder than what we ran at that point. We lost a good half an hour or 45 minutes fixing a right-rear caliper that was leaking. This is by far the toughest racing in the world – it’s truly the last endurance racing there is. (Would you try to race for the SCORE Trophy-Truck championship again?) We have a conflict at Laughlin with Dakar, so I won’t be at Laughlin next year. As many points was we won the championship by this year, I could probably miss Laughlin and still win it but I think we’ll probably focus on the Tecate SCORE Baja 500 and Tecate SCORE Baja 1000 next year.

From Tracking International