Chase Race Ten: The Ford 400 at Homestead - Miami might have been won by ful throttle by Carl Edwards but the race also gave JJ's his extraordinary 5th consecutive NASCAR Sprint Cup title after a brethtaking season, ahead of struggling Denny Hamlin who was left 39 points behind the chase leader. It’s an exceptional moment in the NASCAR narrative. For all of the sport’s history until Johnson grabbed firm control of the wheel, only Cale Yarborough had been able to string together three straight Sprint Cup championships.Team owner Rick Hendrick also got in on the record-breaking activity, as his 10th Cup title (five by Johnson, four by Gordon and one by Terry Labonte) broke a tie with Petty Enterprises.
Champion crew chief Chad Knaus, the only pit boss to win five straight titles, now trails only retired Dale Inman, Richard Petty’s long-time crew chief, in the career championship total. Inman has eight.
They are dizzying numbers but ones that have come to be expected from Johnson and his team, even in a season in which they started the Chase with a 25th-place run at Loudon, NH and a late-season scramble of Hendrick pit crews after Johnson’s normally reliable team faltered.
Even though Carl Edwards won Ford 400 in a dominating way leading 190 of 267 laps in winning his second consecutive Cup Series race and the 18th of his career.
Edwards joked with crew chief Bob Osborne after the race.
"Why didn't you set the cars up like this before, Bob? That was the best performance down the straightaway I've had in a long time."
The race for the title was anything but perfection. And it wasn't the high drama fans had anticipated from the closest Chase since the introduction of NASCAR's playoff format in 2004.
Before the race Johnson was 25 laps behind Hamlin who made a tough job much more difficult. His No. 11 Toyota, which had started the race 37th but had gained 18 positions in the first 23 laps, touched the No. 16 Ford of Greg Biffle as the cars sped through Turn 2 on Lap 24. Hamlin spun through the infield grass, damaging the front splitter and knocking the toe angle of the tires out of position.
Though his crew worked feverishly to repair the damage, the incident affected the handling just enough to keep Hamlin from making an aggressive run to the front. His troubles were compounded when he was trapped a lap down during a cycle of pit stops and had to take a wave-around to the tail end of the lead lap. At that point Hamlin was fighting Harvick for second in the final standings, not battling Johnson for the championship.
"I felt like, as soon as we dropped the green, I thought we could win the race. Our car was really fast at the beginning -- I mean, just unbelievably fast at the beginning -- and I knew we had a car that could contend for a win, and obviously when we got in that incident on the back straightaway, it tore up the front and knocked the toe out, and obviously the car did not drive as well for the rest of the day. We just tried to patch it and work on it the best we could, but it just wasn't the car that it was at the beginning. It's just part of racing."
But still, Johnson's substitute crew borrowed from Jeff Gordon's No. 24 team in the middle of the eighth Chase race (at Texas) and bound to Johnson thereafter made repeatedly sloppy work in the pits costing the champion valuable track position.
To call the final race a comedy of errors on the part of the title contenders may be harsh, but championship team owner Rick Hendrick did precisely that.
"It was like, 'Who's going to screw up the most?'
Johnson restarted second on Lap 251 after Harvick dumped Kyle Busch, Hamlin's teammate, into the inside frontstretch wall to cause the 10th and final caution on Lap 244. Johnson couldn't catch Edwards over the final 17 laps, but he pulled away from Harvick to secure the title.
In the afterglow of a fifth consecutive title, however, the flaws in the process didn't matter and after Johnson crossed the finished line 1.608 seconds behind Edwards, Chad Knaus radioed him
"Jimmie, you are a rock star, my friend. You have proven it time and time again. And you damn did it [Sunday], my friend."
Johnson finished 39 points ahead of Hamlin and 41 ahead of Harvick and commented in the victory lane
"I'm just beside myself. Four was amazing. Now I have to figure out what the hell to say about winning five of these things, because everybody is going to want to know what it means. I don't know. It is pretty damn awesome -- I can tell you that.", continuing a surge of his own for his second straight win, Johnson’s amazing feat brought a new level of astonishment to the garage area, where the sport’s top talent has spent half a decade fruitlessly chasing Johnson and Knaus.
I was very relieved to get the first one [championship]; it was super, super special. But this has a different feel. I’ve had a good time with this. This has been fun. I’ve really soaked in this experience and enjoyed it.
I have to give a lot of credit to the 29 and 11 and their teams and the effort they put out. It wasn’t easy by any means. After all the years of the Chase to have it come down to this final race – it was cool to be a part of it.”
Although Johnson finished second and outran Hamlin by 39 points for the championship, crew chief Chad Knaus described Sunday as “a taxing day. We knew what we needed to do was go out and run competitively. It was not shaping up exactly how we wanted to early on. The car was not quite as good as we wanted it.
Jimmie Johnson, who sits in his racing throne atop the NASCAR world for a record fifth straight season, will have a two-day news media blitz at New York where he’ll try to explain how he’s won five straight after a 2009 season in which he often struggled to explain how he had won four in a row.
Next on the Johnson-Knaus radar is championship No. 6 – Six-Pack as they called it. Assuming they can get that one – and why would anybody assume anything else? – there will be the hunt for a title that will tie Johnson with Petty and Earnhardt, two of the sport’s legends.
Johnson commented:
“I’d love to tie them. I’d love to surpass them. I don’t know how realistic that is. I never thought I’d get to this point. We’ll start working on six next year. We’re a hell of a lot closer now than when the day started. I’m now looking at those marks that the greats have put out and hopeful to get up there to them.”
