RICHMOND, Va. -- Very little, with the possible exception of Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s consistent excellence, has gone as expected this season for Hendrick Motorsports.

And so it was, at the end of Saturday night's Crown Royal 400 at Richmond International Raceway; that Hendrick's No. 24 Chevrolet driver Jeff Gordon and his crew chief, Steve Letarte, were expressing some relief after they battled to remain in the top-10 for the night, rather than contending for the win.

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I'm really proud of this team. That was a great battle -- a great fight. It showed what we're made of. We didn't make a lot of gains in the points, but we didn't lose anything. It was good momentum for our team. We needed this run.

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JEFF GORDON

"I know [at the end] it wasn't that bad, but it wasn't that good, either," Letarte said. "You know, we're not a top-10 team. We come here to win and we haven't given [Gordon] a winning racecar since maybe Vegas though, in Martinsville we maybe had a winning racecar there.

"So it's just disappointing, but it was a great fight. It was a championship fight; it just wasn't a championship car."

"I had my hands full," Gordon agreed. "You just try to match yourself up against the competition. We started out and we were loose in and tight in the middle and loose off, and that's a hard thing to fix. But we got it freed up in the middle and that's when our car got better.

"And we made some moves and got to the front. A lot of guys were struggling with handling tonight. There at the end we weren't as good as we needed to be but we were an eighth or ninth place car."

It's almost incomprehensible that Hendrick Motorsports, which won nine of the 16 races with the new car a year ago, has only won once in the first 10 races this season, when the car is in use full-time.

And nearly a third of the way into the season, Gordon's only had four top-10 finishes, with three others of 35th or worse.

At this point last season, counting only the tracks where the new car was used, Gordon had three poles and a win -- but even greater, no start worse than third and no finish worse than fourth.

This season at Bristol, in the season's fifth race, Gordon and his team struggled mightily, but never fell out of the top 20 before finishing 11th.

That night, it was more than a half-hour after the checkered flag before an emotionally and physically drained Gordon emerged from his No. 24 transporter to answer every question he was posed about that night's dilemma.

On Saturday afternoon, when his team arrived at Richmond's garage and tried to fire-up its car, there was dead silence. They changed the starter motor, which cured the problem, but relegated Gordon to the back of the starting field.

With a less-than-ideal car and an abysmal starting position, Gordon was in trouble from the get-go; and left him pretty thankful at what Letarte and his boys were able to accomplish.

"Well, in a lot of ways it was almost a miracle to get a top-10 because we went down a lap so early and I was giving it everything I had and the leaders just drove by me like I was standing still," Gordon said. "And we just weren't getting the cautions at the right time and then I just got by the No. 44 [David Reutimann] and the No. 00 [Michael McDowell] and the caution came out and I was like 'man, that's the first good thing that's gone our way in a while.'

"We were making gains on the car at that time and we really were better than a lot of guys we were racing around and we started driving to the front. It was pretty impressive that one time we drove from 30th up to about 15th or something. And I was really impressed with that run. We needed that."

The biggest thing was that Gordon's points drop was minimal. At one point, as he raced 12th-place point man Kasey Kahne for a top-10 spot late in the going, it even seemed as if Gordon would be back in a Chase for the Cup-qualified spot by race's end.

As it was, he ended the night unofficially in 13th, six points out of 12th.

"I'm really proud of this team," Gordon said. "That was a great battle -- a great fight. It showed what we're made of. To come home with a top 10 was good.

"We didn't make a lot of gains in the points, but we didn't lose anything. It was good momentum for our team. We needed this run."

But it still leaves Hendrick's lead duo with perhaps more questions than answers, except when it comes to the current competition level in Sprint Cup.

Gordon thinks he has an answer to the problem, though not how to solve it.

"I know why it's happening," Gordon said. "It's happening because Goodyear is changing tires on us a little bit so we've had to adjust to that. The competition has gotten better.

"If we come back the same, we're going to be even worse than we are now. That's just the way this sport is and how really tough and competitive it is. Your competitors go to work when you're good or when they're not. And that's what's happened.

"And now we're in the position that we have to go to work and that's what we've been doing. We've been testing a lot these last couple of weeks."

Letarte was singing from the same hymnal.

"It's just everything," Letarte said. "It's taking the car to new tracks [and] even at the tracks we were good at, I think the field's gotten a whole lot better. It's definitely different tires -- it's just everything.

"I wish I could tell you exactly what it was, because I would change it. But that's why this sport is so good, and that's why there are so many people in the stands -- it doesn't matter how you were last week, how you were today or how you were last year.

"You've got to show up every week and we're just a little off on the chassis side, right now."

To that end, Gordon's somewhat relieved that this weekend's Dodge Challenger 500 is at Darlington Raceway, a track where he and his team tested twice earlier this spring while doing Goodyear tire development.

But even that presents no guarantees, despite the fact that Gordon is the race's defending champion in the race that the new car's fifth outing last year.

"Yeah, I feel comfortable that we know what to expect with the tire," Gordon said. "When you're there in a tire test, you really don't get to work on speed and making the car better and go faster -- you're just trying to test for Goodyear.

"But it gives you good data to work on back at the shop and I hope that it pays off for us."