Jeff Gordon running strong but can't gain ground in Chase

• The four-time champion's last six finishes: 3rd, 2nd, 2nd, 35th (oops), 3rd, 2nd
• Ground is tough to come by against the top two of Brad Keselowski and Jimmie Johnson
• With seven races left, the Hendrick driver is 48 points out of the series lead

What does Jeff Gordon gotta do to catch a break?

The guy has finished in the top three — TOP THREE — five times in the last six races in NASCAR's premier series.

He finished second in Sunday's AAA 400 at Dover International Speedway, following last week's third at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. But despite those finishes worth 85 points out of a maximum 96, he has lost ground in the Chase for the Sprint Cup title run.

That's right. Gordon's 47-point deficit to leader Brad Keselowski following the Chase opener at Chicagoland Speedway has grown to a 48-point deficit. With only 48 possible each race (for winning and leading the most laps), the grind would appear to be of the extremely uphill variety.

"We're not going to continue this championship against those guys up front if they keep running the way they're running," Gordon said. "The only way we're going to get a chance at them is if they have a problem like we had."

Gordon was referring to his 35th at Chicagoland, where a broken return spring sent the four-time champion's No. 24 Chevrolet crashing hard into the Turn 1 wall.

Wasn't Gordon's fault, and it happened after he powered his Impala from 19th into the top five. But as he said, the way points leader Keselowski and Jimmie Johnson are running, making up for that nine-point Sunday over the Chase's final seven races could prove next to impossible.

Keselowski has finished 1-6-1 to start the Chase; Johnson (five points behind) has gone 2-2-4. Their average Chase finish of 2.7 is well ahead of third-place Denny Hamlin's 8.3 and fourth-place Clint Bowyer's 7.7.

So what can Gordon do? Well, he is looking at the positives. He's gone from 12th to 10th in the standings over the last two races. And he's sliced his deficit from fifth place from 32 points to 16.

"You guys focus too much on the top guy and not enough on fifth place," Gordon said. "We have to look very realistically at this point. It's only been two weeks since we had our incident in Chicago. We've gained a tremendous amount of points on fifth place, sixth place."

Gordon said he'll continue to focus on top-fives and gunning for wins. He probably won't hoist the champion's trophy at Homestead-Miami Speedway on Nov. 18.

But if he continues his incredible run of top-threes and Keselowski and Johnson each have one or more major calamities ... who knows?

As the Jim Carrey character Lloyd Christmas famously ascertained in the 1994 comedy Dumb & Dumber after the love interest played by Lauren Holly tells him his odds are one in a million she'll date him: "So you're telling me there's a chance. YEAH!"

Said Gordon on Sunday, "If we keep running like this, we'll get the wins. We can't control what the other guys do. We can only control what we do."