Jeff Gordon can draw many positives from his 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup season, but none of them are a major cause for celebration to him.

While Gordon enjoyed a campaign that most in the Cup garage would envy, it wasn't entirely to the satisfaction of the four-time series champion.

Gordon started the year off on fire, finishing worse than sixth only once in the opening seven races and winning at Texas Motor Speedway, a track where he'd never been to victory lane.

Then his performance fell off as he finished 14th or worse in four of the next six races.

While Gordon returned to top-10 form, the Hendrick Motorsports driver never won again and only briefly regained the points lead he held from the season's fourth race to the ninth.

He finished the year with 16 top-fives and 25 top-10s, including a series-high eight second-place finishes, and qualified for NASCAR's 10-race Chase For The Sprint Cup.

Gordon was eliminated from championship contention with one race left, however, and finished third in the standings, 179 points behind teammate Jimmie Johnson and 38 behind teammate Mark Martin.

Thus Gordon's drive for championship No. 5 rolls on for at least another year.

"We had a very good year, no doubt about it, but we're pretty realistic: It wasn't enough," says Gordon, who claimed the most recent of his four titles in 2001. "Obviously, [that's] why we're third. It was a big step up from last season, and I'm very proud of that. I feel like our efforts and the direction that those efforts went into were very beneficial, but they weren't enough. So we've got to do more, and that's what we're analyzing and breaking down [is] all those details."

An analysis of Gordon's season will show much improvement over 2008, when he failed to win for the first time since his rookie season of 1993, finished seventh in the standings and scored fewer top-fives and top-10s than in 2009.

But despite also snapping a much-publicized 47-race winless streak with his triumph at Texas, Gordon was never as consistently fast as Johnson and Martin, who combined for 12 victories. In fact, Gordon was the only driver among the top six points finishers not to notch multiple wins.

"I don't feel we got worse; I don't feel we slowed down," crew chief Steve Letarte says of the weeks that followed Gordon's stellar start. "I feel the competition caught up, and I feel we as a car number and as a race team did not overcome or find new speed or follow through on some weeks that were the opportunity to speed us back up. We gained, and then we plateaued. And I feel that we as a team need to evaluate everything top to bottom.

"No stone will be unturned. We're going to turn them all over and look at every part of it, from me to Jeff to pit crew to early crew to race teams to cars."

Letarte, who isn't ruling out offseason personnel changes to the No. 24 team, is already proving to be a man of his word. He skipped this year's annual Sprint Cup awards banquet to get a jumpstart on preparations for 2010.

"The people are what make up your organization and make you strong, and there are certain things about a person – it could be myself, it could be Steve, it could be a pit-crew member or an engineer – that … we dissect it down and analyze each and every one of us," says Gordon, a winner of 82 Cup races. "We try to bring in a third party as well to give us their opinion. And then we're going to be honest, honest with ourselves, honest with others. And to me, the people are what make the cars go fast.

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"The people are what make the pit stops go fast and what make you competitive from February to November, and I'm one of those people just like everybody else."

If there's one area where Gordon stands to improve next season, it's probably in gaining or at least maintaining speed through the course of a race. Several times in 2009, the California native ran among the leaders in the opening segments of an event before fading down the stretch.

This happened perhaps most notably at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in the opening race of the Chase in September. Gordon started 10th and ran in the top five for much of day before sliding back to 15th in the final running order.

He left New Hampshire 10th in the standings after losing four spots.

"One of the things that I'm working really hard on right now is our in-race communication," Gordon says. "I feel like with this car and some of the challenges that it's brought and the intensity that the Chase brings, I think that you've got to give a lot of credit to Jimmie and that No. 48 team. They didn't show all their strength during the season, and when the Chase came around, they stepped it up. But they didn't just step it up like going fast.

"I think it was a lot of different areas. And I feel like one of the things we do really well is start the race strong, but I don't feel like we did a great job at making the car better as the race went on or keeping up with the changing conditions, and I feel like I play a big part in that."

Letarte also takes some of the blame.

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"I think the number one thing we need to do is close races," he says. "I think that if you took the 36 races, of the 36, we had cars capable of running in the top three in 32 or 34 of them at some point. And I feel of those 32 or 34, [in] 20 or 15 of them we kept the car the same or made it better. Ten or fifteen of them we made the car worse. … I need to ask the right questions, I need to work on my race-day adjustments. We need to work on our communication – Jeff and I.

"Nothing's off the table. We're going to work on everything we can do because I know I have a driver that's one of the most talented guys ever to sit in a stock car."

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