Sunday’s Pep Boys 500 was a study in why Hendrick Motorsports teammates Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon have turned this year’s Nextel Cup championship into an intramural duel.
Johnson’s crew chief, Chad Knaus, made a split-second audible call for two tires in the pits on Johnson’s final stop, putting him in position to grab his eighth victory of the season through what Gordon called “just crazy madness at the end.”
Gordon’s crew nursed a fitful Chevrolet from the brink of what could have been a disastrous day and brought him home seventh, so he maintained the lead in NASCAR’s Chase for the Nextel Cup, though now by only nine points over Johnson.
Also in classic Hendrick form, Johnson, a native of El Cajon, Calif., in the area ravaged by wildfires last week, donated his entire winner’s share of $349,561 to the American Red Cross earmarked for burn victims in California. Team owner Rick Hendrick and Atlanta Motor Speedway Chairman Bruton Smith each will match Johnson’s gift, so “we’ll be sending well over $1 million,” Johnson said.
What had been a yawner of a race went wild with seven laps to go in the regulation 325, then continued into green-white-checkered overtime.
A third Hendrick driver, Kyle Busch, had been dominating the late stages of the race when his crew had trouble getting his right-front tire off in the pits. Noticing their ruinous delay, Knaus changed his call from four to two tires to get Johnson out in second place, behind Denny Hamlin, who had chosen not to pit.
On the restart, Hamlin’s car ran out of gas and he was unable to accelerate, causing cars to stack up behind him and bringing out another caution to send the race into overtime.
Johnson led, but Carl Edwards and Dale Earnhardt Jr. bunched up behind him, threatening to snatch the win. But in the first turn on that final restart, Earnhardt’s left-rear tire fell off and he crashed, freezing the field for keeps with Johnson at the front before Edwards had a chance to challenge.
“Man, I’d have given anything for those last two laps to go green,” Edwards said. “I think we would have had an awesome race with Dale and Jimmie.”
Johnson figured he had the situation handled regardless.
“I got a really good restart,” Johnson said. “I had four or five car lengths on him getting into Turn 1, and our car was the best it had been all day. I do know that Carl would have been committed to running wide open and doing whatever it took to win the race.
“I assume it would have been a great battle, but I feel confident we would have been able to hang on and win the race.”
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But Johnson acknowledged his Chevrolet had been “a fifth- to eighth-place car throughout the day, and circumstances really worked out for us at the end, and we took advantage. Chad’s pit call is really what put us in contention to win the race.”
Said Knaus: “The only way for us to gain on [Gordon], as competitive as they’re running, is for us to go for the wins. When that caution came out, we knew we didn’t have a car capable of winning the race at that point. But usually late in the race, cautions breed cautions, so track position was going to be important.
“We called an audible right there, took two tires and went with it.”
Gordon languished between 10th and 20th for much of the race. But his crew finally corrected his car’s extremely loose condition.
“We were too far behind at that point,” he said.
Although his Chase lead was chopped from 53 points to nine, “I’m just happy to have a points lead right now after the day we had,” Gordon said. “All I’m focused on and concerned about right now is trying not to have the bad day.”
Clint Bowyer finished sixth but gained only four points on Gordon and is now 111 back with three races left.
“We’ll just keep putting the pressure on — now we’re in striking distance — and we’ll see what happens,” Johnson said.
Said Gordon: “When we had that 53-point lead coming in, we didn’t feel like we had a lead, and the pressure was on. Now we’ve got a nine-point lead and the pressure’s on even more.”
Hendrick, who has to referee the friendly but ever intensifying duel, said, “We’ll see if our nerves can stand three more events.”
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