As reported on Nascar.com:

DARLINGTON, S.C. -- Traffic giveth and traffic took away a possible win from Jeff Gordon Saturday night at Darlington Raceway, but there was no question Gordon's second-place finish in the Dodge Charger 500 provided something valuable.

It was just a great run for us, so close and momentum that we can carry into next week and the next couple weeks at Charlotte," Gordon said. "I'm very happy."

After sitting in a season-high sixth in points for two weeks, Gordon had fallen to ninth after losing an engine and finishing 40th at Richmond. Even though it was only one race, Gordon knew he had to get back on track.

The runner-up finish did that as Gordon climbed back to sixth, and it's got him hopeful for the short-term future.

"You hope to have a good finish anywhere we go," Gordon said. "Knowing that we haven't quite perfected or figured out some of the set-ups on some of these other tracks that [Kasey Kahne] and [Tony Stewart] and some of those other guys have figured out [worries us].

"So we knew coming into this track that we were going to take that old approach and hope that it paid off -- and it did."

But with even as few as 10 laps remaining around Darlington's treacherous, 1.366-mile oval, Gordon felt there was no way he could catch winner Greg Biffle's No. 16 Ford -- which for the fourth time in 11 races this season led the most laps.

But lapped traffic and the fact that Gordon's No. 24 Chevrolet was in a position to seriously challenge Biffle with less than two laps to go despite getting damaged when he slapped the wall while chasing down third-place Matt Kenseth.

But at the same time, Ken Schrader's No. 21 Ford, which was battling to remain on the lead lap, was in the line Gordon needed to occupy to make a run at Biffle; and that was game, set and match.

"We're coming up to take the white flag and the two leaders are battling and we got a run on [Schrader]," Gordon said. "And you would just expect like the other lapped cars that we came up on, to give a little bit more room.

"And he gave plenty of room to [Biffle] and I carried it in there [Turn 3] on the outside of him, but I needed to be able to go up to the wall and then turn down and come back to the bottom.

"That was my line I ran all night long. I'm not saying [Schrader] knew that, but I felt like with a little bit of extra room there, I would have been able to do that."

For his part, Biffle agreed that traffic inevitably allowed Gordon to catch him but he cut Schrader some slack for his part in the incident.

"Jeff Gordon wasn't even gonna come close to catching me, but I tried to pass [Dave Blaney] for three laps," Biffle said. "I lost so much ground because he made me pass him on the bottom and I just couldn't do it.

"The thing you've got to remember is your tires are so wore out that you can't even get out of the way. I caught [Schrader] three quarters of the way down the back straightaway and I knew Gordon was five to eight car lengths back.

"I knew he was gonna have trouble [because] he was gonna catch the lapped car in the corner, which is trouble. It's just the way the cards fell."

"It killed all my momentum and made the car push even worse into the outside wall," Gordon said. "So I lost every chance that we had."

Heading into the two-week stretch on most of the drivers' and teams' home ground, with the Nextel All-Star Challenge and Coca-Cola 600 at Lowe's Motor Speedway outside Charlotte, N.C., he said he couldn't put a price in the momentum gained Saturday night.

"I'm very happy to be up there battling for that win, obviously," Gordon said. "It's been a little while since we've been able to do that [and] gosh, it was just so close. I wanted it so bad that I was a bit disappointed."

At the end of the night, Gordon was praising Darlington Raceway -- a place where he's won six times -- for its "old-school racing," and he and crew chief Steve Letarte used an old-school setup on their car to enable its long-run virtuosity.

"It's a modified version of the set-up that we ran here last year, and we finished second [then]," Gordon said of the look that had the nose of his car noticeably further off the racetrack than most of the competition. "We've had set-ups not too far from this in our books for a long, long time at Hendrick Motorsports.

"Every year you try to improve on it and I think our car improved on it, as well."

So it has Gordon enthused about his trip "home" to Charlotte after scoring his fourth top-five of the season, but his first in five races.

"I'll tell you, we needed a top-five just as bad as a win," Gordon said. "I think that with the last couple of weeks and the way they've gone, a top five is fantastic for us -- but when you're that close to the win you want it really bad.

"It's not about needing it, it's about wanting it and the fact that the team put out that effort that was capable of a win [was big]."