Chase Race Eight: The the AAA Texas 500 was a knockout blow to Jimmie Johnson's title hopes, and a stinging message by victorious Denny Hamlin to the four-time defending Cup Series champion.Hamlin's victory, his series-best eighth of the season, his second in a row at Texas Motor Speedway and the 16th of his career, was perhaps the most effective in his Cup chase but the race was remarked by the haymaker Jeff Gordon -- yes, Jeff Gordon -- who tried to lay on Jeff Burton after Burton wrecked the No. 24 Chevrolet under caution on Lap 192.
And Hamlin's victory certainly wasn't as surprising as Chad Knaus' dismissal of Johnson's No. 48 over-the-wall crew after a series of blown pit stops. With Gordon's No. 24 crew available, Knaus knocked his own crewmen out of the box; the last straw was slow work on the right-front tire under caution on Lap 194.
Johnson minimized the damage with a 9th-place finish, but repeated loss of track position helped transform his 14-point lead over Hamlin entering the event into a 33-point deficit as the series heads to Phoenix with two races left.
In a three-lap sprint to the finish, after Patrick Carpentier spun in Turn 2, Hamlin swapped the lead with Matt Kenseth and surged ahead for good when Kenseth ran out of room in Turn 2 on Lap 333 of 334 and had to back out of the gas.
Kenseth held second, matching his best finish of the season, with Mark Martin running third, Joey Logano fourth and Greg Biffle fifth. Biffle led a race-high 224 laps but lost first and second gears in his No. 16 Ford and couldn't accelerate on restarts.
Kevin Harvick came home sixth and remained third in the standings, now 59 points behind Hamlin.
Despite holding the points lead, Hamlin promised to race aggressively at Phoenix and in the season finale at Homestead to secure his forthcoming title.
"I'm going to race Phoenix as if I'm 33 behind, to be honest with you. There's no comfortable margin going into Homestead, because anything can happen. So for me -- Phoenix being an up-and-down race track for me -- I've got to really be focused on practice day to get what I need, to give [crew chief]Mike [Ford] the information that I need -- just 100 percent stay focused is all I can do.
But like I say, I'm not going to be conservative having the lead. I'm going to want to stretch that out before we get to Homestead. So that's pretty much my mind-set."
Trailing with two races left in the Chase is an uncharacteristic position for Johnson, who has been the frontrunner after eight races in each of the past four years. Moreover, he lost his pit crew after his chief crew decision to dismiss them in the middle of the race.
"The past four years, we've been in a different position. I've lost plenty of championships in the past, and this is racing, and it doesn't come easy, and you are not going to get what you want every single year and every single weekend.
I can promise you this -- I am trying as hard as I can. I know my team is. We're doing everything we can. Thirty-three points back is not where we want to be, but we're going to work to get back on top."
Gordon's pit crew helped salvage a respectable finish for Johnson. After the change, the No. 24 crew performed flawlessly for three stops and following a meeting at Hendick's Headquarter he agreed with Steve Letharte to swap crew members for the remaining 2 races.
Chaud Knaus announced:
"I don't think people understand that it's not an easy decision to do that kind of thing. It's something where emotions are involved, and we understand that. We love our guys. We eat, sleep, drink with them. We win with them; we lose with them. We do whatever it is with them. But ultimately, it's bigger than seven guys. We're 520 people strong on this team, and we're 80-plus people strong in this building. So it's more about the team than about what people think."
... I don't think it's an act of desperation by any stretch of the imagination. It's an act of what we've got to do to try to win the race," Knaus said. "We've got a setup in Phoenix that we like a lot. We've got a car that we run in Phoenix that we like a lot. We're not going to go and run that exact setup if it's not fast. I hate to say it as bluntly as this is, but it's like changing a spring or changing a shock or something like that. You have to put the best components together to try to win a championship."
Marshall Carlson, general manager of Hendrick Motorsports, added that there are many interchangeable personnel parts within the organization and the four full-time Sprint Cup teams it fields. And he stressed that the crew chiefs have all of them at their disposal at all times to use as they see fit.
"Really, the way our system works is that this is a crew chief-led organization. We say that a lot -- but this is actually a living example of that. The way our system is built, with pit crews in particular during a race, any one of our crew chiefs can call for a backup from any of the other teams.
So at the track we have the seven members who go over the wall. And each team also has two backup athletes at the event. And any team can pull any of those backups to their team if they have a need. So what happened on Sunday in Texas was an example of that. Chad's team conferred, and it happened immediately. They didn't need to consult anyone else. They knew where their authority was; they knew they had that capability. They made the decision and went on."
