HMS drivers find clearing on a cloudy day at M'ville

MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- Usually when it rains, it pours.

Just ask any struggling race team. They'll be quick to say that bad luck seems to breed more of the same.

But don't ask anyone from Hendrick Motorsports those brooding questions any longer. At least not this week.

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Sunday during the Goody's Cool Orange 500 at Martinsville Speedway, four Hendrick drivers and 39 others from the Sprint Cup Series raced for more than three hours and 35 minutes, taking 500 laborious circuits around the .526-mile paperclip in a steady drizzle. Despite gray, ominous clouds that hovered over the competitors and a crowd estimated at 63,000, constantly threatening more mayhem, the heavy downpour never came.

Nor did the bad luck, or mistakes, that had plagued three of the four Hendrick teams much of the season. Or at least the Hendrick drivers -- Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Casey Mears -- avoided enough of it or were able to overcome whatever adversity came their way to post strong finishes across the board.

Although the race was won by Denny Hamlin in his No. 11 Toyota owned by Joe Gibbs Racing, and kudos were rightly delivered to Hamlin all around, the Hendrick teams that went into the race squirming under a blanket of criticism emerged on the other side bolstered by a renewed sense of optimism.

Race victories usually do that for an organization, and it's true that Hendrick remains strangely winless for the season. But in this case, the next-best scenario was achieved through the group effort that included a second-place finish by Gordon, a hard-earned fourth by Johnson, a sixth by Earnhardt and a seventh by Mears.

"There has been a lot of criticism that I think is unnecessary on Hendrick. I think [Sunday] pretty much proved where we were at," Gordon said Sunday. "You know, we dominated this race. We might not have won it -- and that's what has happened to us at other races, too. We've been really, really the cars to beat and had a great team effort and everything, but we just haven't had the results to show for it. But [Sunday], I thought it was a pretty darn good day." (Continued)