LONG POND In the world of storybook endings, the outcome of Sunday's Windows 10 400 at Pocono Raceway might not have been exactly how Jeff Gordon would have scripted it.

Gordon, making his final start at the "Tricky Triangle" in his last season in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, is the track's all-time wins leader with six. His last victory came in August of 2012, a triumph that kick started a string of five straight victories for Gordon's team, Hendrick Motorsports.Though he earned a hard fought third place finish, Gordon wasn't a contender for much of the race, hanging around the middle of the pack before fuel mileage came into play and allowed him to grab several spots in the closing laps."We just kind of hovered around that area, I wasn't real pleased with how our car was in traffic," Gordon said. "When we were up front, we were pretty good, and I felt like we had a top-five car."But we played the fuel-mileage strategy pretty early and that lost us track position and we weren't able to climb our way up through there. But we continued that strategy and I'm proud of Alan (Gustafson, crew chief) for sticking with it."That plan put Gordon in position to capitalize when those in front of him started to run out of fuel.Entering the final 10 laps of the race, Gordon was scored in 16th position. But one-by-one, many of the race's early contenders, such as Joey Logano, who led a race-high 97 laps, Kyle Busch, going for his fourth consecutive win, and Martin Truex Jr., who won the June race at Pocono, all faded as their gas tanks ran dry."There at the end, we were one of the last ones to pit, which allowed us to run hard all the way to the finish and not have to conserve or save fuel," said Gordon, who led once for two laps. "I thought we were trying to get maybe 10th or 12th, and all of a sudden they said that I was third, and I think I was probably the most shocked person out there on the race track when I found that out."I knew cars were peelingoff, but I didn't realize that many were either running out or coming to pit road."After getting involved in a crash early last week at Indianapolis Motor Speedway - a track he was won at five times -¬ relegated him to a 42nd place finish, Gordon was happy to rebound with a strong finish at another track he has had quite a bit of success at."The script I had played out in my head was that we were going to be 15th, so this one was way better than that," Gordon said. "For whatever reason, the last couple of times we've been here we've had decent race cars. Maybe not the cars that we would have liked to have had, but cars far capable of better finishes than what we've had and have been getting with a lot of different circumstances playing out. Some to our own credit and others just circumstances (out of our control)."Today finally one went our way for a change, which is really nice to bounce back after last week's unfortunate incident where we lost so many points."There's no question Gordon's farewell tour has taken a few detours along the way. After winning four races a year ago and looking like a serious threat to win the championship, Gordon has managed just three top five finishes this season and hasn't yet found his way to victory lane.Despite his struggles and occasional bad luck, Gordon has a chance to keep the momentum going next week at Watkins Glen where he has won four times."This track (Pocono) is nothing like Watkins Glen. But we need every bit of a boost that we can possibly get," said Gordon, who is now 10th in the point standings. "It's not been the kind of season that we would hope to have in my final season and certainly hasn't stacked up to what we had last year, but we don't quit. We fight for every race to build a better race car, to get the performance up, pay attention to our competitors, and do all that we can to put the best race car and race team out there."Sometimes you just need something to pull you through it, and last week got us down quite a bit. This is definitely going to lift us back up, so we'll try to…I think it's not about carrying momentum, it's about getting momentum, and I think this is the beginning of hopefully what can get us the momentum we need to get where we need to be."