He was saying, Oh, this tire is terrible for this track, crew chief Chad Knaus said Sunday after Johnson had held off Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jeff Gordon to win the race. I told him, Hey, we will do a better job of figuring this out than anybody else, this is an opportunity.
And so they did.
Johnson pounced as Gordon was occupied with trying to hold off Jeff Burton the late going, passing his teammate and then, on Lap 240, Burton to take command en route to his 24th career Nextel Cup victory.
Johnson, the reigning series champion, said hes proud that his team seems to look at potential setbacks as openings.
I am confident that this team seems to figure things out at a fast pace, Johnson said. Whenever theres a new rule or we go to a new track, we seem to smile and say thats a chance for us to step up and figure things out before other teams do.
Accepting that as fact, Johnson should have been obvious choice to win this weekend. Not so much because hed won here the previous two years, but because all of the teams arrived at this newly configured track with very little to work with.
Because of high speeds during a test here in January, NASCAR decided to use a 13-gallon fuel cell instead of the new standard 17.5-gallon tank and Goodyear came to the race weekend with tires significantly harder than theyd provided for that test.
That left teams flying blind in terms of having the kind of data they normally use to prepare for a race. Some teams just seemed to get more and more befuddled and madder and madder about it -- but Johnsons No. 48 Chevrolet got good enough soon enough to overcome an eventful day and go to victory lane.
I tuned the car off Turn 4 by hitting the wall one time, and we had a tire roll away on a pit stop, Johnson said. A penalty for the errant tire on a stop on Lap 109 put Johnson back in 25th for the restart, but he quickly moved back into contention.
Knaus adjusted air pressures to try to compensate for the brush with the wall and, for a restart on Lap 232, Johnson was third behind Gordon, who led 111 laps, and Burton, who was trying to score a weekend sweep.
In his win in Saturdays Busch race, Burton went to the outside of Kyle Busch to make a winning pass on the last lap. Hed run up high on Sunday, too, and when the green flew on that Lap 232 restart he went up there to start working on Gordon.
When he (Burton) got that little bit of bumper outside of me I was so loose underneath him I was stuck on the bottom, Gordon said. I knew I was in trouble, and Jimmie took advantage of that. He saw that as an opportunity to get by us and he did.
Johnson had to work hard for a couple of laps to get past Burton, but he finally cleared the No. 31 Chevrolet on Lap 240 and took off from there. Burtons car was bedeviled by an electrical issue in the closing laps and he faded to 15th.
Gordon held on for second with Denny Hamlin and Matt Kenseth rallying in the late going to take third and fourth, respectively. Mark Martin was fifth for his third straight top-five finish of the young season.There were nine cautions, three fewer than in Saturdays 300-mile Busch event.
The first half of this race, we were so incredibly out of control it was some of the worst conditions I have ever been a part of, Gordon said. We were so loose I couldnt drive the car.
Johnson said he nearly lost control himself two or three times during the race, but he still coped well enough to lead 89 laps and earn the victory.
Typical stuff, Knaus said.
These guys really ramp it up when its go time, he said of his team, to which Knaus read the riot act after the tire rolled away to draw the midrace penalty. We have a team full of racers. We had a meeting today before the race started and talked about how the reason were here is to win races.
Knaus said that late in the race as he thought about whether to take two or four tires on a pit stop, he felt his stomach tighten up.
I felt like I was going to throw up trying to decide, he said. That is why we race. Were really pretty sick.
But winning is certainly good medicine.
