Jimmie Johnson finally shows the touch, beating Greg Biffle and Denny Hamlin to win California 500
Jimmie Johnson crosses the finish line 2-1/2 seconds ahead of Greg Biffle and Denny Hamlin to win the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Pepsi 500 at Auto Club Speedway on August 31, 2008 in Fontana, California. (Photo by Robert Laberge/Getty Images for NASCAR)
By Mike Mulhern
FONTANA, Calif.
Jimmie Johnson has endured a very ragged season, but he and crew chief Chad Knaus may finally be getting back in the swing of things – just as the NASCAR championship chase gets ready to begin.
Johnson dominated Sunday night’s four-hour Pepsi 500 at California’s Auto Club Speedway to win by 2-1/2 seconds, but he couldn’t shake playoff-bound but still winless Greg Biffle. And Denny Hamlin, also fighting for a playoff spot, during an erratic summer stretch, was also right up front, perhaps signally a change in his fortunes too.
Johnson led 227 of the 250 laps in winning for the third time this season.
“I’m just glad to be able to close the deal, because usually when you have a car this good, you end up doing something stupid,” Johnson cracked.
Nevertheless, with one race left till Richmond’s Saturday night championship playoff cut, the battle for NASCAR’s Sprint Cup championship still looks like Carl Edwards versus Kyle Busch, a Ford-versus-Toyota deal. The two didn’t headline Sunday night, but they did run top-10.
And Edwards concedes it’s a long, long way from here to the season finale at Homestead Thanksgiving week: “And Jimmie Johnson has proven that he can do it when it matters. You’re going to have to beat Jimmie to be the champion.”
And neither Edwards, the spring winner here, nor Busch, the Saturday night winner here, had anything for Johnson, in Knaus’ Chevrolet. Edwards finished sixth, Busch seventh.
The 500-miler was relatively incident-free, with the only notable cautions being for caution lights falling on the track.
“But i don’t know how much to read into this, because the intermediate tracks, particularly the 1-1/2-miles, have been our weak spot this season,” Johnson said, “and the chase is chocked full of those tracks.”
Jimmie Johnson (48) leads teammate Jeff Gordon (24) during the Pepsi 500 at California’s Auto Club Speedway. Johnson dominated; Gordon struggled home 15th. (Photo by Jerry Markland/Getty Images for NASCAR)
Busch came into the race with a 212-point lead over Edwards. And the two go to Richmond with Busch leading by 208. For the first race of the chase, at Loudon, N.H., next week, the 12 title contenders will all have their point totals essentially re-zeroed, evening the playing field for the final 10 events.
The rest of the top-12 after 25 races:
Dale Earnhardt Jr. (11th Sunday) clinched a playoff spot; he trails Busch by 369 points.
Johnson, clinched, is down 432.
Jeff Burton (17th), also clinched; he’s 521 down.
Tony Stewart (22nd), 596 down.
Biffle, 623.
Kevin Harvick (fourth), 645.
Jeff Gordon (15th), 674.
Matt Kenseth (fifth), 681.
Hamlin, 690.
Clint Bowyer (10th), 766.
The two men on the bubble:
David Ragan, the second-year driver trying to crack the playoffs, (13th), is 783 behind Busch—and needs to catch Bowyer at Richmond.
Kasey Kahne, also on the outside looking in to make the playoffs if he can, (eighth), is 814 behind Busch—and he needs to catch both Ragan and Bowyer.
An early Jimmie Johnson pit stop during Sunday’s California 500. The four-hour race started in the hot, sunny afternoon and ended in the desert cool of the evening. Johnson won in front of a crowd of about 75,000 at the 92,000-seat facility just east of Los Angeles (Photo by Jerry Markland/Getty Images for NASCAR)
Now the road to the championship next leads from here cross-country to Richmond, Va., Saturday night’s 26th tour event, and NASCAR’s big-rig truckers will be running right through the havoc expected from Hurricane Gustav…just like they had to do a few years ago when Katrina struck.
And teams are hoping the next hurricane coming up from the Caribbean doesn’t drench Richmond International Raceway.
Edwards and Busch appeared to have made their peace. Busch blew away the field in Saturday night’s Nationwide race, and after it was over Edwards charged up to give Busch a playful bump.
“It’s very cool to have our team running so well, to be on top of our game…and it’s really fun to have somebody like Kyle so fast,” Edwards says. “There have been a couple of races where it’s like either me or him, and I think that brings out the best in people.
“For us, it’s been a lot of fun.
“If it comes down to just him and me for the championship, that would be fine. But I have a feeling some of these other guys are going to have something to say.”
Kahne, Dodge’s only hope to make the playoffs, insists he’s not sweating it, even though he was a disappointment here: “I can’t worry about what the other guys (Clint Bowyer and David Ragan, challenging him for a playoff spot) are doing. We’ll just race our race. If we race well, I think we’ll make the chase. If the guys in front of us race well, then we won’t.”
Biffle, who dogged Johnson the entire night in one of his best runs lately, says he’s thinking championship. He came within 35 points of winning the title in 2005… but he failed to make the playoffs the last two seasons, and he says that’s because his cars simply weren’t fast enough. Biffle and crew chief Greg Erwin may well have enough speed this time; they certainly had more than teammates Edwards and Matt Kenseth.
“I’m glad we’re on our way to getting in,” Biffle said. “And we could be a tremendous amount better right now than where we’re at— we could be third in points or fourth, if not for a handful of just dumb things.
“If we get in the chase, the thing we’re going to have to be tough on is not making any mistakes.
“We’ve got six races we finished 40th or back there a long ways, when we’d been running in the top-five. If we could just shift the clock back a little bit, that would have put us up third or fourth…with Darlington being one of them, possibly a win, and maybe a couple others being close to a win.
“So I feel good about getting in the chase…and that we can do something when we get there. Yeah, this year feels a lot different.”
In the closing laps of the race Biffle’s crew asked Knaus if he could have Johnson back off a bit and help brush some paper off Biffle’s nose.
“I’d have done the same thing,” Knaus said with a laugh. “But I told them no. Jack Roush (Biffle’s car owner) throws zingers at us every now and then, and I just didn’t think we’d be interested in helping them right then.”
Gillian Zucker, track president, inducts Jimmie Johnson into the track’s Walk of Fame. Zucker has been counting on El Cajon’s Johnson to help her promote NASCAR racing in the Los Angeles market...and Sunday’s win certainly helps. (Photo Credit: Jason Smith/Getty Images for NASCAR)
While those 14 men are battling for the right to play for the NASCAR championship, others are just battling for their rides.
Patrick Carpentier, for one, is fighting to stay on the tour, now that car owners Ray Evernham and George Gillett have hired Reed Sorenson. Evernham and Gillett say they’d like to put Carpentier in a new fourth team car next season, but Carpentier understands that might be unrealistic, in the current economic climate.
So Carpentier, who qualified a solid fifth, was disappointed when a broken transmission forced him to the rear of the 43-car field for the start.
“We needed it this week,” Carpentier, the transplanted open-wheel star, says. “I mean, with last week (Bristol) the whole week was bad.
“For me it’s a sad situation, but I know these guys are putting a lot of money out of their pockets to do this, and they need to make it happen.
“They’re trying to find full funding for a fourth team for next year, and they’re trying to reorganize the team. Hopefully I’ll still be there next year. But it’s a tough situation.
“But I can understand it.
“Before, I was on the other side and the sponsor needed me and where I was from and all that.
“Gillett-Evernham has been amazing for me. Without them I wouldn’t have had a ride at all this year. All this was a fairy tale—from no ride at all and working on a farm to being here with these guys like Jeff Gordon.
“So it’s pretty amazing. I’ve still got to pinch myself at times.
“But I enjoy every moment of it. I love it. I love to drive the cars in the series.
“Let’s say I don’t have a ride: I’m not mad at the team…but Canadian sponsors, I’m surprised they don’t come on board. NASCAR’s got so much visibility, and we’ve been working hard at it. We still are.
“We brought a few of them to a couple of races, and they seem very interested, and they would benefit from it quite a bit. Just Montreal with the Nationwide race, the sponsor we had last year had more coverage from that than from something else that cost them more than 10 times.
“The Gillett family owns the Montreal Canadians, and they know a lot of sponsors, and, believe me, they’re trying hard, I know they are.”
Kyle Busch was in a world of his own in Saturday night’s Nationwide 300 at California’s Auto Club Speedway...but he had nothing for Jimmie Johnson in Sunday’s Sprint Cup 500 (Photo Credit: Stephen Dunn/Getty Images)
This is Toyota’s home track, and AJ Allmendinger (whose future is one of many in doubt) started from the front row and ran top-10. But he’s got Formula One driver Scott Speed standing in the wings waiting for a stumble that could open the door to a driver change.
And despite Busch’s amazing season, the rest of the Toyota drivers are still fighting against a so-so performance image.
Toyota’s Mike Skinner, in Michael McDowell’s Camry the past few weeks, to help car owner Michael Waltrip figure some things out, says he’s “in kind of a consulting position. We’ve learned a lot, and I’ve given them some areas to work…areas they already knew they needed to work but might have just needed somebody else to get in the car for two or three weeks to prove that.
“I think they’ll get better, as AJ Allmendinger did: His team changed some personnel, and now it’s a top 10 car.
“We know the equipment’s good; it’s just a matter of getting the people to communicate with the equipment and the driver to make it go fast.”
The man expected to be Toyota’s leader this season, Stewart, was again never a factor. Stewart, who is expected to announced his 2009 crew chief later this week, Darian Grubb, from Hendrick Motorsports, may already be looking ahead to next season when he debuts as owner-driver….and he says 18-year-old Joey Logano is an excellent choice to replace him in Greg Zipadelli’s Toyotas. “I’m proud of Joey,” Stewart says of the kid who will make his Cup debut this week at Richmond in a team car. “I really like him.
“His record the last couple of years speaks for itself. I don’t think you could ask for a better guy to replace me…and I’m happy that’s the guy.
“He’s the perfect guy. He’s in the perfect situation: he’s a good kid, he’s got a great family, and he’s going to do things right.
“I’m behind him 100 percent.”
But that’s next season, and Stewart and Zipadelli still have a championship to battle for this fall. And they still recall that Loudon chase opener a few years back where Stewart got taken out in the opening miles, and he spent the last three months of the season out of the hunt and fuming.
Stewart and Zipadelli haven’t had a great season so far. Not a bad season, really. They could easily have opened by winning the Daytona 500. But this year has been their best. So Stewart says he doesn’t have great feelings for the upcoming chase: “Not yet. I feel great about the effort that’s being put forth. I’m proud of my team, I’m proud of Zippy, I’m proud of our guys and how hard they are digging…but we just haven’t found that one thing or two things that we need right now.
“The great thing about this organization is these guys won’t quit. It doesn’t matter if, with two races to go, we’re 12th in the points. They are still going to keep working just as hard as we are right now.
“You keep doing the same things that we’ve done for 10 years – that’s won us 33 races and two championships.
“But right now we’re not where we need to be.”
Still, he’s optimistic: “It starts off as anybody’s game,” Stewart says of the 10-race chase. “You know the drill— Mathematically, as long as you have a shot, you’re still in the hunt.
“But every week somebody is, for the most part, going to take themselves out of contention. It will be that way each week.
“And you could be 500 points back starting the chase, but if you stumbled on something that’s going to be good for those last 10 weeks, you could be 12th in points and still have just as good a shot as the guys leading if things go your way.
“No matter where you’re at when you start the chase, you have to be ready to seize that opportunity.”
Hamlin, teammate with Stewart and Busch, has struggled lately, and he’s been hit-or-miss much of the season. “This is the weekend that’s a question for us. We feel we can run good at Richmond, but here it’s a toss-up. We feel if we can run top-10 here, we should be fine for the rest of the race-to-the-chase.
“Obviously Kyle is doing a great job for our team. He’s going to force us to step up. If we do make this chase, we have a lot to go off of to catch him.
“The good part is we feel all of our strong tracks are in the chase. If we can just get there, we should be fine.
“Our performance this year has not been as good as last year, when we were leading a lot more races and contender on a more regular basis. But last year was not the best for us: We made the chase, but we didn’t make it to New York (because only the top 10 finishers make the trek to the banquet), and that was a real downer.
“We felt we were probably a third-place car last season behind Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson. They performed impeccable during the chase; we really ran good, competed for a lot of wins in the chase, but we wrecked at the end of them.
“If I make it this year, the one thing we’re going to change is to ease our way through the chase. If we finish 15th the first week, don’t feel we’ve got to get it all back in Week Two – that’s the mistake I made last year.”
Jeff Burton, making his 500th career start, says he and crew chief Scott Miller are still ‘testing’ things for the playoffs. And it shows. They were never in Sunday’s hunt.
“Right now I hope we can get Richard Childress a championship – that one of the three of us can,” Burton said, referring to teammates Kevin Harvick and Bowyer. “It would it mean as much to me for one of these guys to win as it would be for me to win because we truly are doing it as a company.
“The pressure is on us to get it done. Richard is giving us the stuff; we just have to go get it done.
“We have been, for the last six weeks or so, I won’t say ‘in experimental mode’ but we have been very open to ideas. We didn’t feel like we were locked in the chase by any means six weeks ago. We needed to improve.
“No matter how much we test, it is hard to simulate being in a race. We have been very much off of what we would consider our baseline stuff, trying to find something.
“We gambled a little bit and said we have to be willing to finish 30th running bad to go try and find a better way to run.
“I think we have found some better ways to run. Our results don’t show it, but we ran better at Bristol than when we won in the spring. We ran better at Pocono, at Michigan. We ran well at Indy. We have actually run better in the last month than we did the month prior.
“This is what I like, and my goal is to get about 800 starts. I think I can do that.”
Agree? Disagree? Don’t just brood. Express yourself here, and make your voice heard clearly in NASCAR headquarters in Daytona and Charlotte and in NASCAR race shops throughout North Carolina and the rest of the country.
We want your reaction, so please comment on this story and offer your own opinions and insight, on this topic, on our NASCAR videos, and anything about NASCAR. Any questions, just ask Mike at . And bookmark this page for continually updated NASCAR reports: http://independenttribune.net/index.php/sports/mulhern/
Nope, that’s not snow on the mountains overlooking California’s Auto Club Speedway, butt Jimmie Johnson (48) and the NASCAR gang had relatively good weather for this 500, temps in the high 80s...unlike last year’s 114 degrees. (Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
