Pulling off the bump-and-run: Jeff Gordon reveals how it's done. Need proof he's the best at it? Ask Bobby Labonte or Rusty Wallace. (NASCAR).

SEE A DIFFERENT GAME

With its short back stretch and narrow turns, Richmond is the perfect track to execute the bump-and-run, especially if drivers can't get their cars to work in a second groove.

Second groove? Jeff Gordon doesn't need a second groove. He recently pulled a bump-and-run on Bobby Labonte to win at Martinsville, and Rusty Wallace still has nightmares about the bump-and-run Gordon executed on him last August at Bristol.

Gordon, the four-time Winston Cup champion, doesn't have a patent on the bump-and-run--drivers have used the move for years to win on short tracks--but there's no one else in the garage who uses his front bumper with such touch and precision.

Most drivers learn the move by watching others perform it or by having it done to them. Gordon gives credit to the late Dale Earnhardt, perhaps the best ever at the bump-and-run (and sometimes not so subtly), with teaching him the proper way to perform the move through experiences on the track.

"When Earnhardt got to you, he could move you out of the way," Gordon says, "and you would be sitting there scratching your head and wondering, `Did my car get loose, or did he hit me? I don't even know.'"

That is the art of driving--to be so fine that the bump causes the driver to lose a position because his car wiggles but doesn't put him in danger of wrecking. But sometimes, after a long day or night of beating and banging on a short track, one person's art is another person's finger painting.