TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Johnson Locks Up Nextel Cup Championship

ADVERTISEMENT

By TONY FABRIZIO, The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 19, 2007

HOMESTEAD - Completing a late-season blitz that will go down as one of the greatest finishes in history, Jimmie Johnson did more than he had to do Sunday at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

He finished seventh in the Ford 400 - 11 spots better than the minimum needed - and he captured his second consecutive Nextel Cup championship by 77 points over teammate and friend Jeff Gordon.
Matt Kenseth won in his final race with longtime crew chief Robbie Reiser, and after he crossed the finish line ahead of Kurt Busch, Kenseth and Johnson pinned the noses of their cars against the track's outside retaining wall and performed a tandem burnout.

Another celebration broke out in No. 48 team pit stall, where crew chief Chad Knaus and his crew members celebrated a seventh championship for Hendrick Motorsports since 1995.

"We're in elite company winning two championships - winning back-to-back championships - and it's something I'm very proud of," said Johnson, the first repeat champion since Gordon in 1997-98. "The good thing, I feel, is we're just hitting our stride."

Added Knaus, "They say a dynasty is anything over three. We're on two."

Johnson completed NASCAR's version of a postseason with an amazing run. Down by 68 points to Gordon midway through the 10-race Chase, he put together NASCAR's first four-race winning streak since 1998 to take an 86-point lead over Gordon into Sunday's finale.

He finished the year with 10 victories - the most since Gordon tied a modern-era record with 13 wins in 1998 - and top-three finishes in six of the final eight races.

Gordon, who finished fourth, lost his bid for a fifth championship in a year in which he set a modern-era record with 30 top-10 finishes, beat Johnson by 415 points in the "regular season" and had a 5.1 average finish in the Chase - which easily would have won the championship in any of the previous three years.

"I'll be honest, I really thought as aggressive as they were being in the Chase, it was going to bite them," Gordon said. "I guess I was just a little too confident in the whole consistency thing. ... But man, if they didn't pull it off."

Gordon said he realizes that if he's going to beat Johnson next year, he'll have to drive his cars more on the ragged edge.

"We recognize if we're going to push it a little harder in the setup," he said. "I've got to drive a setup that's going to be a little freer through the corners - that's what's going to make it faster. That's what I'm going to be working on through the offseason."

Johnson started on the pole and led the first lap, snatching the five-point bonus for leading a lap. It was the only lap he led all day.

With Kenseth, Busch and third-place finisher Denny Hamlin keeping their cars up front throughout the race, Johnson ran between fifth and 10th except for a brief period in which he got trapped a lap down.

Gordon started 11th and also ran in the top 10 most of the race, although he struggled with handling early and never led a lap.

Johnson was running seventh on the next-to-last lap and had the championship in hand when he did something that made no sense. He stuck the nose of his Chevrolet inside Martin Truex Jr.'s car and started to make a risky pass.

Then he caught himself and settled for seventh.

"Coming in here, you may not believe it, but we really wanted to win the race," Knaus said. "Obviously, by sitting on the pole, I thought that was a show of faith that's what our plans were.

"Our plan was to go 200 laps, wait for that last pit stop, and if we were in position to go for the win, that's what we wanted to do. The reality of it was, once we got into the race and realized what a good car we had - that he could just find a place and ride safely in the top 10 - that's how it all switched."

Kenseth got his first victory since winning the second race of the year at California in February and finished the year with five consecutive top-five finishes, propelling him to fourth place in the final standings.

If not for a blown engine in the Chase race at Dover, where he led 192 laps, he might have beat Clint Bowyer for third.

The 2003 champion said he had second thoughts about doing his celebratory burnout because he didn't want to take attention away from Johnson.

"But then I started thinking," Kenseth said. "He's won 10 races this year, and he's burned up about 12 sets of tires in the last four weeks, and he won the championship last year. So I figured it wasn't a big deal for me to go out there and do a burnout and then take off."

Kenseth will have a new crew chief next year in Chip Bolin, his team engineer since 1999. Reiser is stepping up within Roush-Fenway Racing to run the five-car Nextel Cup program.

Johnson closed the deal Sunday, but where he really won the championship was getting consecutive victories at Martinsville, Atlanta, Texas and Phoenix.

"It was really a lot of fun," Knaus said. "We are pretty fierce competitors, and what we want to do is win races. When we knew that our only way to get back into the championship hunt was to win races, it was nice. It was good that everything worked out for us. The cars were very fast. Jimmie did a phenomenal job."

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT