Steve Letarte

Letarte and his team rebounded with finishes of: 5th at Martinsville, 6th at Atlanta, 9th at Texas, 4th at Phoenix and a 24th-place finish at the season finale at Homestead, and ended the season 6th in the final points standings.

Gordon also experienced an engine failure with 33 laps to go at Charlotte which relegated the No. 24 to a 24th-place finish.

They finished in the top five in both of the first two races, but posted 39th- and 36th-place finishes in the next two events, due to a failed fuel pump in Kansas Speedway and a crash at Talladega Superspeedway.

Steven Letarte (born May 14, 1979) is an American professional NASCAR crew chief and sportscaster who works for NBC Sports as a color commentator on their telecasts for NASCAR.

He also works as a consultant for Spire Motorsports, a NASCAR Cup and Truck Series team.

Astonishingly, Gordon went winless for the first time since his rookie year in 1993.

He was previously a crew member and crew chief for Hendrick Motorsports from 1995 to 2014, retiring after 20 years with the team.

Letarte began working for Hendrick Motorsports part-time in 1995.

In 1996, at the age of 16, he joined the group full-time.

From 1997 to 1999, he worked as a tire specialist for Jeff Gordon's No. 24 team.

He then became a mechanic and finally car chief in 2002.

For the first time since 2004, the No. 24 Chevrolet made the Chase for the NEXTEL Cup.

From September 2005 to 2010, he was the crew chief for Jeff Gordon's No. 24 car and from 2011 to 2014, he was the crew chief for Dale Earnhardt Jr..'s No. 88 car.

Letarte was promoted from car chief to crew chief after Gordon missed the 2005 Chase for the NEXTEL Cup.

He was promoted after 26 of the 36 races in the 2005 season.

In Letarte's sixth race as crew chief with Gordon, he visited victory lane for the first time in October 2005, winning the Subway 500 at Martinsville Speedway, in Martinsville, Virginia.

Gordon improved with three top-five finishes in the last five races of the 2005 season.

Entering the 2006 season, Hendrick Motorsports made wholesale changes to the No. 24 team.

Gordon fought major handling issues at almost all of the intermediate racetracks, (1.5/2-mile downforce racetracks) which relegated Gordon to run outside the top-ten and even outside the top-fifteen.

Gordon finished outside the top-ten at California, Texas, Charlotte, and Pocono – all of which were down-force tracks.

When the series reached the 2-mile racetrack of Michigan International Speedway, near Brooklyn, Michigan, in mid-June, Gordon experienced a huge turnaround at a track that he had struggled at in previous season.

Gordon led the most laps and finished eighth in a rain-shortened event; showing an instant improvement in Gordon's downforce program.

Gordon experienced an up-and-down postseason in 2006.

In 2007, Gordon finished the year with 6 wins, Gordon's highest total since 2001, and a series-leading 21 top-5s, the most scored in a season since 1999.

The No. 24 team also finished with 30 top-10s, setting a new NASCAR modern era record for most top 10s in a single season.

They dominated the points standings throughout much of the year, earning, in total, 353 more points than Jimmie Johnson's No. 48 team, and 706 more points than Tony Stewart's No. 20 team (who earned the third most points of any team in 2007).

However, due to the Chase playoff system, Gordon lost the championship to Jimmie Johnson.

Their performance in the Chase was exceptionally good however, winning two races and scoring an average finish of 5.1, but it was not enough to outperform Johnson, who racked up more wins and better average finishes than Gordon.

The team posted a respectable 19 top-10s and 13 top-5s en route to a 7th-place finish in the season's final standings, but it was a disappointing follow-up to the 2007 season.

2008 would be a brutal reminder of how difficult racing in NASCAR's top series can be.

Despite being the target of blame from many critics for the team's failures, Jeff Gordon and Rick Hendrick stood by the longtime Hendrick Motorsports employee and Letarte returned at the helm for 2009.

Gordon snapped his career-high 47-race winless streak with a victory in the Samsung 500 at Texas Motor Speedway (one of only two tracks Gordon had yet to win at on the NASCAR circuit at the time) on April 5, 2009.

But alas, it would be Gordon's only win of the 2009 season.

For the 2011 season, the crew chiefs of all of the Hendrick teams except for Chad Knaus were switched around.

In the switch, Letarte was reassigned to Dale Earnhardt Jr.., while Earnhardt's former crew chief Lance McGrew was reassigned to Mark Martin and Martin's former crew chief Alan Gustafson was reassigned to Gordon.

The pairing of Letarte and Earnhardt Jr. showed strong results early in the 2011 season.

On April 3, 2011, Earnhardt Jr. held the lead late in the race at Martinsville Speedway, but was passed with less than 5 laps to go by Kevin Harvick who would drive on to victory.

During the Coca-Cola 600, Earnhardt Jr. held the lead on the final lap, but was forced to surrender the lead to Harvick when he ran out of fuel.

The team had a strong year however, finishing 3rd in the final standings and leading the series with both 16 top-5s and 25 top 10s.

As an organization, Hendrick Motorsports finished an impressive 1–2–3 in the standings as Gordon finished third, Mark Martin finished second and Jimmie Johnson won his record-setting fourth-straight championship.