Fryer’s Five: Johnson delivers gut check (Yahoo! Sports)
September 28, 2009
Remember when Carl Edwards won at Atlanta last October, but had his victory celebration spoiled when he learned Jimmie Johnson finished second? The crestfallen Edwards looked as if he’d just been punched in the gut. No matter what he did to take care of his own championship chances, he couldn’t do enough to neutralize Johnson.
Now, 10 other drivers know exactly how Edwards felt that day.
Nobody had anything for Johnson at Dover International Speedway, where the three-time defending champion befuddled the competition with yet another win on the concrete oval. Johnson led 271 laps on Sunday, turned the usually competitive double-file restarts into exhibitions of his own dominance and literally pulled away to his fourth win of the season.
It deflated the other 11 contenders in the Chase for the Sprint Cup.
“I’m pretty sure that dude’s Superman,” Mark Martin said.
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“They’re strong everywhere. There’s no weakness to their race team at all,” Denny Hamlin added.
After a fourth-place finish in the Chase opener at New Hampshire, Johnson used his Dover win to put the competition on the ropes. Through just two rounds of the 10-race Chase, he’s second in the standings, just 10 points behind Hendrick Motorsports teammate Martin.
And he’s headed next to Kansas Speedway, where he’s the defending race winner and has five top-10 finishes in seven career starts.
It’s got to be maddening to begin a race thinking you are properly prepared, give everything you have for three-plus hours and not even dent Johnson’s apparently Teflon armor. The Chasers on Sunday certainly got an up-close look at Johnson’s plan to win a record fourth-straight title, and they had to feel much the same way Edwards did last fall at Atlanta.
Fear. That’s what Johnson wanted to elicit from his competition Sunday.
“I certainly hope that our performance today scares some people, and affects them in a way that benefits us,” he said.
1. Is Martin the best hope to dethrone Johnson?
The 2007 version of the Chase was arguably the best in terms of a captivating competition. Johnson and Hendrick teammate Jeff Gordon battled through the first eight rounds, until Johnson finally delivered the knockout punch by winning his fourth consecutive Chase race at Phoenix.
He wrapped up his second title a week later in the finale at Homestead, using a 5.0 average finish to deny Gordon a fifth championship.
Where did Gordon slip that season? He’s still wondering after posting a 5.1 average finish over the 10 races.
“I’ll be honest with you, I’ll take a 5.1 average for the rest of my career in the Chase,” Gordon said that day. “I’m pretty sure that will win a few championships.”
He’s probably right. But for two weeks now, Martin has insisted it won’t take a pace remotely close to that to win the title this season.
Martin was adamant there will be room for error over these 10 races. He had not changed his tune on Sunday, when he finished second to his teammate.
For those counting at home, Martin has finished first and second so far in the Chase and has an average finish of 1.5. And he’s only leading the standings by a meager 10 points.
The guy has been nearly perfect and he’s barely leading the Chase. Yet he still thinks there’s plenty to come over the remaining eight races in a wide-open title hunt.
“It’s just two races,” he said. “And I think a first and second is a pretty good way to come out of the gate. But we’ve got eight more to go, and all kinds of things can happen. I still say that there’s 12 in it, and 12 can win. It might be a challenge for a couple of the teams that are toward the back right now, but you just don’t have any concept, I guess, of how much racing eight races is.
“It’s a lot of racing. A lot of things can happen.”
Although technically true, it doesn’t really apply to Johnson when you consider his success rate. Spot Double J a decent lead, and it’s likely lights out for everyone else.
If you don’t want Johnson to win again this year, then it’s probably best to throw your support behind Martin. That’s not to dismiss any of the other contenders, but with his fast start to the Chase, he might be the only one capable of competing at the same pace as Johnson.
2. Kurt Busch is clearly not going to let Pat Tryson’s departure sabotage his season.
With sincere apologies to Busch and Tryson, I was clearly wrong on this one.
I was certain the No. 2 team had zero chance to challenge for the title. Tryson is leaving in eight weeks to crew chief Martin Truex Jr. at Michael Waltrip Racing, and the move led Penske Racing officials to ban him from the shop every day but Tuesday.
I couldn’t have been the only person wondering how in the world a team can win a championship under those constraints.
Well, they may ultimately not have enough to challenge Johnson or Martin or even Juan Pablo Montoya. But Busch and Tryson have proved through the first two races that they aren’t going down without a fight.
Busch followed his sixth-place finish at New Hampshire with a fifth at Dover, and he led considerable laps in each event. He was out front for 99 laps on Sunday, second only to Johnson.
He’s now fourth in the standings, 75 points behind leader Martin.
“It was a nice solid day for us,” Busch said.
Solid enough to back up what Tryson has been saying all along: Just because he’s leaving doesn’t mean he’ll mail it in the rest of the season. But would you blame the guy if he did? After all, he was told not to bother going into work on days he’d typically spend 10-plus hours at the race shop.
Although he’s not revealing the exact reasons behind his decision to leave, Tryson has been adamant that his departure has nothing to do with Busch. That’s easy to say, but convincing skeptics is a whole different matter.
Running up front goes a long way toward silencing the cynics.
3. Try explaining how Dover is not like Daytona to Joey Logano.
The rookie experienced the wildest ride of his young career just 32 laps into Sunday’s race, rolling his car seven times down the back straightaway at Dover.
“I’m still shaking,” Logano said some 15 minutes later.
Logano was running nose-to-tail with Bobby Labonte and Tony Stewart when Stewart hit the back of him, sending Logano sliding down the concrete and into the grass. His Toyota then shot back across the track and ran nose first into the wall. That’s where Reed Sorenson ran into the side of him, and that contact lifted Logano’s car up for its numerous barrel rolls.
“It just really scared the heck out of me,” Logano said. “It started rolling and I was in there like, ‘Damn, please make this thing stop.’ And it wouldn’t. It just kept going and going. I’m just happy it landed on its wheels. It was the wildest ride I’ve ever been on.
“You can’t go on a roller coaster any worse than that.”
It was honest emotion from the 19-year-old Logano, who has had an up-and-down first full season at NASCAR’s top level.
He crashed out of the season-opening Daytona 500, when he became the youngest driver to participate in NASCAR’s biggest race of the season. But that was nothing compared to Sunday, and if his words didn’t convey that, his ashen face certainly did.
No one expects to see a wreck like that at Dover – the flipping and rolling is usually at Daytona or Talladega, the two tracks where restrictor plates bunch up the field and spectacular accidents are common. So the fact that Logano’s frightening wreck came at Dover was a bit of a surprise.
Once again, praise NASCAR’s safety developments for helping him walk away unscathed. That won’t help Logano sleep any better this week, though.
The best thing for him will be at Kansas on Friday, when he gets the chance to get back in his car and tick off some laps. It’s a lot like getting back on a horse, and hopefully Logano will fall right back into his rhythm.
4. That accident rattled Stewart, too.
Not much unnerves the two-time NASCAR champion, but he was clearly unsettled after seeing his old car tumble along Dover. That his contact triggered the wreck wasn’t lost on Stewart, either.
“I’ve never felt sicker in my life than when we hit Joey like that. We hit him a ton,” Stewart said. “I didn’t see it coming, that was the worst part. He had to check up, something happened in front of him to make him have to do that and I don’t know what it was. When he did, we drilled him in a spot where we were supposed to be wide-open on the race track.”
Damage from the accident dropped Stewart as low as 37th, and he made a heck of a rebound to finish ninth. Still, he wasn’t thrilled. Although he moved up to fifth in the standings, he lost ground to Martin and is now 106 points out.
“I can’t say I’m satisfied because I still lost points,” Stewart said. “That’s how competitive this Chase is. I got a top 10 and I’m not happy with it.”
After leading the points for 13 weeks heading into the Chase, Stewart was expected to be a serious contender for the title and become the first owner/driver since Alan Kulwicki in 1992 to win the championship. But he’s had a rough start, finishing 14th at New Hampshire to fall to sixth in the standings.
In the Chase opener, Stewart also had to overcome a broken axle cap that dropped him deep into the field. Both comebacks have showed the resolve of his Stewart-Haas Racing team, but they haven’t gotten Stewart off to the start he’d hoped.
Still, he had praise for crew chief Darian Grubb and his crew for their tenaciousness. To get his Dover rebound, the team had to patch a hole in the nose of his Chevrolet.
“I think that happened on Lap [32] and we had almost the whole day still left,” Stewart said. “We had to be smart. Darian and those guys did an awesome job. They just kept chiseling away.”
5. That was probably “just racing” between Denny Hamlin and Brad Keselowski in the Nationwide race.
But it quickly became clear that there’s no love lost between those two.
They got tangled on the track late in Saturday’s race when Keselowski had a run on the inside of Hamlin and Hamlin moved down low to block the potential pass. Keselowski hooked the corner of Hamlin’s car, starting an accident that wrecked Hamlin but allowed Keselowski to scoot by for a third-place finish.
Tempers flared on pit road afterward. Hamlin approached Keselowski at his car and clearly had a finger in Keselowski’s chest as he apparently lectured the young star. There seemed to be a slight shove before a female public relations representative for Keselowski stepped in front of her driver and pushed Hamlin back. Crew members quickly separated the two.
There is a history between these two. They had an incident in the Nationwide Series last year at Charlotte that left Hamlin fuming. “You throw a rock, I’m going to throw a concrete block back,” he said. So it’s not too surprising that Hamlin pursued Keselowski after the Dover race.
Later, in his post-race comments, Hamlin also took a slight shot at Keselowski boss Dale Earnhardt Jr., who was friends with Hamlin before Hamlin made it big in NASCAR. The two have since had some sort of falling out.
“He obviously needs some sort of guidance on what he needs to do to make it,” Hamlin sniped, seemingly accusing Earnhardt of not properly nurturing the JR Motorsports driver.
What was a bit surprising – aside from Keselowski allowing a woman to get involved in the scuffle – was how cavalier Keselowski was in taking any responsibility for his role in the accident. Was it just one of those racing deals where neither can be absolved of blame? Probably. But Keselowski, the younger driver who has yet to step into his pending full-time Cup Series job, should have shown Hamlin a bit more respect than he did in his post-race comments.
“He left a hole to pass him … he just tried to take advantage of me,” Keselowski said of Hamlin. “I’m not going to be pushed around. He tried to take advantage of me. I had to make a decision whether to let him or not, and the rest is history.”
And that attitude is perhaps what is behind Hamlin’s beef with Keselowski.
There have been whispers for some time that Keselowski’s ego has swollen a bit, in part because of his backing from Earnhardt and Rick Hendrick, as well as the last-lap Cup victory at Talladega that made him a very hot commodity.
Nobody is saying Hamlin deserves to be bowed to or is some sort of revered veteran who younger drivers need to hold in high regard. But this is his fourth full season, and he has made the Chase in all four. That’s worth a little respect – particularly from the unproven – both on and off the track.
Jenna Fryer covers NASCAR for The Associated Press and is a regular contributor to Yahoo! Sports. Send Jenna a question or comment for potential use in a future column or webcast.
