Jimmie Johnson and Hendrick Motorsports are the hottest driver and team in NASCAR, every which way–unstoppable lately in the Car of Tomorrow or traditional cars, on short or intermediate tracks.
Johnson has won three of the last four races and Hendrick four straight, counting Kyle Busch’s victory in the COT’s debut March 25. Senior teammate Jeff Gordon leads the point standings, but he hasn’t been happy flying escort in the Hendrick onslaught. He is winless this season with three second-place finishes and a third.
In the most recent race their only competition was each other, with Gordon ramming the unyielding Johnson’s rear bumper for the final few laps April 1 at Martinsville, Va.
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But now they tangle with Texas Motor Speedway, where all bets are off every time a green flag drops on a Nextel Cup race–and where no current Hendrick driver has won.
This time their Chevrolets are up to overrunning the nemesis, both Johnson and Gordon claim.
“As a company, we’re coming in more excited for this race than we ever have,” Johnson said. “[If there’s] any time we’ve had a chance of a Hendrick car winning here,” Gordon said, “or [myself] winning here, it’s this year.”
Gordon will start on the pole and Johnson third in Sunday’s Samsung 500, whose starting order was determined by point standings after qualifying was rained out Friday.
Racers are back in traditional cars here after two straight shakedown races in the new COT design.
Jeff Burton, who will start alongside Gordon for Richard Childress Racing, said the Hendrick streak is simply the crest of a wave that began toward the end of last season, when Johnson swept to the Nextel Cup championship and when “the 24 (Gordon) and the 48 (Johnson) were really, really good.”
Anywhere else, Hendrick would be favored heavily to do what no Cup team has done since Petty Enterprises in 1971: win five races in a row.
Only at this $250 million palace with the squirrelly racetrack dipsy-doodling around its infield could the Hendrick stampede arrive as something of a dark-horse effort.
Twelve Cup races here have produced 12 different winners, but Gordon and Johnson aren’t among them. Neither are Busch and the newest Hendrick driver, Casey Mears.
TMS already has bitten the Hendrick armada this weekend. Otherwise, Busch would be starting fifth. Hurtling over the notorious “dip”–which supposedly had been fixed–between Turns 1 and 2 in Saturday’s practice, Busch crashed his primary car and will have to start at the back of the field in his backup. Gordon is fretful about coming so close so often this year without a win.
“It doesn’t really matter to me that it’s Hendrick [teammates] we’re finishing second or third to–it’s anybody,” Gordon said. Gordon was unabashedly steaming over losing to Johnson at Martinsville.
Busch made no bones about each looking out for No. 1 Sunday. “My job is to win for my team,” he said of his No. 5 branch of the Hendrick organization.
“There’s a line that you have to pay attention to with your teammates,” Johnson said. “But there’s a fine line. You have to get up there and lean on that line, but you can’t cross it.”
With each Hendrick driver trying to end a career drought on treacherous Texas Motor Speedway, the line could be thinner than ever.
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