Emotions ride high
Jimmie Johnson’s Cup title eases worries at Hendrick Motorsports, but issues remain,
The backstage of the celebration platform was darkened and emptying Sunday night when Doug Duchardt maneuvered carefully down the gangway to pit road. The Hendrick Motorsports general manager had a freshly unboxed but champagne-tinged Jimmie Johnson championship hat on his head, a can of something in his hand and a look of weariness intersecting relief on his face.
A preliminary consideration would question the lack of jubilation.
The most successful organization in NASCAR history had just added a record 12th Sprint Cup championship for its soon-to-be Hall of Fame owner. Eventual Hall of Famers Johnson and crew chief Chad Knaus had just claimed a record-tying seventh driver title together, all at HMS. All figured to be beyond well.
But this had been a slog. And just because Johnson had exploited a sequence of fortuitous events to parlay a day of misadventure into a history-making endeavor, this moment did not necessarily presage a re-establishment of the dominance that Johnson and Hendrick exacted on the series by winning five consecutive championships beginning in 2006.
In the span of one season, Hendrick had been faced with the loss of a major consumer and racing affiliate when two-time champion Stewart-Haas Racing announced in February that it would leave the Chevrolet camp to use Ford engines beginning in 2017. And NASCAR’s most popular driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr., missed half of the season and has yet to be medically cleared to resume racing after suffering another concussion.
By midseason, the team — like all of the garage — was overwhelmed by a Toyota onslaught in which Joe Gibbs Racing and partner Furniture Row Racing eventually won half of the 26 regular-season races and placed five drivers in the 16-man Chase for the Sprint Cup.
“It was pretty bleak at that point, wasn’t it?” Knaus said.
Team owner Rick Hendrick was so concerned that he attempted to rally his organization by appearing during night shifts at a wind tunnel this summer to, Duchardt said, “show everybody he was in, that, ‘Hey, we’re all rolling up our sleeves, and we are digging in.’ ”
Fielding a rookie — albeit a heralded one in 2014 Xfinity Series champion Chase Elliott — after the retirement of four-time champion Jeff Gordon and with Kasey Kahne again failing to exploit his resources, Hendrick placed only Johnson in the Chase.
Cut through the Chase: Johnson won at Charlotte Motor Speedway to advance to the third round of the tournament-style playoff for the first time, earned a slot in the one-off Homestead final by winning again at Martinsville Speedway and overcame a prerace penalty that forced him to start 40th — last — Sunday.
“I don’t know if six months ago we saw this happening,” Gordon said of the championship, in which Johnson won three Chase races. “But in the last couple months it became realistic, and you’ve got to give Jimmie and Chad (and) all those guys and everybody at Hendrick the credit. And Rick Hendrick. He really put a lot of effort into trying to rally these guys, and, boy, did it pay off.”
Excellent, but not easy, Duchardt said.
“We really locked arms in (the) August time frame, got together and said, ‘We’ve got to improve everything that we’re doing,’ ” Duchardt told USA TODAY Sports. “Rick stepped in. We all just had to re-rack and start turning over every penny and quarter and nickel and stack them. Every department jumped in, and it felt like the sec- ond Michigan (race) we showed some speed, but it was with a different rule package, so we really didn’t know if that was going to carry over.
“We got to Chicago, and it looked like we had some good speed, and that carried through the Chase. Obviously, it’s extremely tough competition. That’s part of what makes it so sweet. Joe Gibbs Racing has been phenomenal the last two years. They’re on a roll. They’re clicking. Penske is a very tough group to compete against. Stewart has and so on.”
Although next season offers a chance for Johnson to become the first driver to win eight Cup titles and for Knaus to tie Hall of Fame crew chief Dale Inman with eight, it doesn’t ensure the team will be better positioned to combat a JGR team that absorbed half of the championship-eligible slots with Carl Edwards and 2015 series champion Kyle Busch.
Still Johnson, 41, remains an indomitable variable.
“I still don’t think that we necessarily had the speed that we need week in and week out. We’ve got to get our cars better, for sure,” Knaus said. “I mean, it was evident (Sunday), right. (Elliott) didn’t run that great, (Kahne) didn’t run great, (Alex Bowman, replacing Earnhardt Jr.). So we’ve got some work to do to continue to be able to compete with those guys.
“The one thing that we have in our corner is we have Jimmie Johnson. He is the one that makes things happen when we don’t necessarily have the race cars. When we do have the race cars that we need, he does phenomenal things.”
Phenomenal was easy this time.