Jimmie Johnson didn’t qualify where he wanted, and his car never quite cooperated during the final practice session at Kansas Speedway. So he spent Saturday evening in the garage area in Kansas City, Kan., going over plans with the rest of his team.
That dedication, that attention to detail, is a big reason he’s chasing his sixth consecutive Cup title.
Johnson and his team must have figured things out. The defending series champion stormed to the front early Sunday, then weathered a series of late cautions before holding off Enumclaw’s Kasey Kahne in a green-white-checkered finish for his first win since April.
“Jimmie was very dedicated last night with us, trying to figure out the setup of the car,” crew chief Chad Knaus said. “We pored over a lot of combinations and we came up with a good one.”
Talk about an understatement.
Johnson led 197 laps in one of the most dominant performances the track has ever seen. The victory was the 55th for Johnson, moving him into a tie with Rusty Wallace for the eighth on the career list, and the 199th for team owner Rick Hendrick.
“The competitor in all of us, we’ve known we’ve been close,” Johnson said.
Johnson stumbled through the first two races in NASCAR’s version of a postseason, and was 10th in the standings heading to Dover. A second-place finish last weekend gave him confidence, and his first win since Talladega moved him into third behind Carl Edwards and Kevin Harvick.
“I know what my team is capable of,” Johnson said, “and we showed today what we’re capable of when we’re all performing at the top of our game.”
Jeff Gordon made things interesting when his engine blew up with three laps remaining.
Gordon ran in the top five for much of the day but went out with three laps to go, finishing 34th and dropping one spot to 10th in the Chase standings.
After dropping out of the top 10 in a late restart shuffle, Gordon had reconciled himself to finishing in the mid-teens — and then things got worse.
“Right after that, we started getting smoke,” he said. “We thought it was tire smoke, but it wasn’t. It was under the hood, and obviously it ended our day.”
Johnson chose not to pit before the sprint to the finish, but still managed to drive away from Kahne and Brad Keselowski on worn out tires. Keselowski, who won the Nationwide race Saturday, wound up third and climbed into fourth place in the Chase with six races left.
“It all comes back to having a good team,” Keselowski said. “Good teams have good cars; they’re the best at the end, the fastest at the end, they have good pit strategy and they’re strong through adversity, and I just have a really good team.”
Edwards struggled with a tight car all afternoon, and he dropped a lap down at one point, but got back on the lead lap after a caution and stormed to a fifth-place finish.
The track’s surface, in use since the track opened in 2001, is scheduled for a multimillion-dollar reconfiguration in the offseason because of cumulative damage from the harsh Midwestern freeze-thaw cycle.
“This track in particular has become very racy,” Keselowski said. “There’s as much side by side racing as you’re going to see in this type of race car, here at Kansas.”
Hopefully when they do go through that process, they’ll be able to get the track to mature quickly and get back to those multiple grooves.”
VETTEL CLAIMS TITLE
Sebastian Vettel wrapped up his second consecutive Formula One championship, finishing third behind Jenson Button in the Japanese Grand Prix in Suzuka.
Needing one point to take the title if Button won the race, Vettel earned 15 points to clinch the title with four races left.
The 24-year-old German star, the series’ youngest two-time champion, has nine victories this season for Red Bull.
After doing a victory lap, Vettel ran to the area in front of his pit where he was mobbed by his team.
“It’s difficult, I don’t know where to start,” Vettel said. “We’ve had a long year, a fantastic year.”
Button raced to his third win of the season for McLaren.
CHASIN’ THE CUP
Unofficial standings in the NASCAR Chase for the Sprint Cup:
DriverPoints
Carl Edwards2,161
Kevin Harvick2,160
Jimmie Johnson2,157
Brad Keselowski2,150
Matt Kenseth2,149
Kurt Busch2,145
Tony Stewart2,142
Kyle Busch2,141
Dale Earnhardt Jr.2,118
Jeff Gordon2,114
Ryan Newman2,107
Denny Hamlin2,082
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