Johnson nabs win from Keselowski,
Brad Keselowski stepped out of his race car, walked down pit road to have a brief conversation with Martin Truex Jr. and trudged on, running his right hand through his hair dejectedly.
It was the end of a day that for so long had seemed so golden for Keselowski, only to turn very dark in the race’s final minutes.
Keselowski led 312 of 334 laps — and it wasn’t even that close. The vast majority of the laps he led were by seconds, not inches.
The assumption most of the day was that he would cruise to the victory and vault forward into the championship finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway in two weeks, earning a chance to add to his 2012 title.
Instead, here came Jimmie Johnson in all of his Texas glory.
Winner of four of the last six races at this 1.5-mile track approaching Sunday’s green flag, Johnson stormed to the front after the final caution period, caught Keselowski and passed him with relative ease for the lead with four laps to go. Johnson won by 1.08 seconds.
Keselowski went from being championship material to a hanger-on hoping to get another shot at running for the title — fittingly, a year after he made an aggressive late-race move here that eventually cost Jeff Gordon a spot in the finale and sparked a scuffle among the pit crews on pit road.
“I’m not sure exactly how to feel about it at the moment,” Keselowski said. “(Johnson) had so much speed the last 10 laps. As I sit right now, maybe I’ll change my mind, ( but) I don’t know what I would have done differently or could have done differently.
“There’s always something you can do better, but not knowing what that might be at this moment makes it a little bit easier to digest.”
Johnson said the controversy of the last three weeks involving Joey Logano and Matt Kenseth popped in his head briefly.
“Maybe when the restart happened, I thought about those guys, but you get so caught up in the moment and racing with guys, and I just like to race guys clean anyway,” Johnson said.
“I kept working on him, working on him, and I could see that he was tight and his car wasn’t ideal. Then he moved up and had the high lane covered, and he got real loose off of (Turn) 2, and I had a big run off the top, and I went for a big slide job down in 3 and 4. And I got the win.”
Track etiquette has been a topic recently because of Logano’s bump-and-win pass of Kenseth at Kansas Speedway and Kenseth’s retaliation at Martinsville Speedway last week, when he wrecked Logano, who was cruising toward a win. Kenseth, who was 10 laps down when he hit Logano, was suspended for two races by NASCAR because, in part, the sanctioning body deemed he was not racing for the win. NASCAR chairman Brian France called Logano’s move at Kansas “quintessential NASCAR” because the drivers were vying for the win.
Kenseth, who was replaced by Erik Jones on Sunday at Texas Motor Speedway, jumped back into the controversy after the race by tweeting: “Good work @JimmieJohnson! Textbook pass for the win at the end of the race when someone is trying to take your lane. #quintessential”
Johnson said his car got better after his team made adjustments during the final round of pit stops and as the track cooled.
“For sure, late in the race was the best we were,” Johnson said. “I hadn’t seen him (Keselowski) that vulnerable. His car wasn’t as good, and mine woke up.”
Keselowski and teammate Logano likely need a win next week at Phoenix International Raceway to reach the final four at Homestead-Miami Speedway on Nov. 22, meaning Team Penske is likely to have a maximum of one driver shooting for the title.
“Certainly, we’d like to get both cars in at Phoenix,” Keselowski said. “I don’t think that’s impossible, but it doesn’t look favorable. We’ll go there and do our best to make it happen.
“As strong as we ran today, if we carry that over to Homestead, good lord, watch out. We know we need to win the next two to win the championship. The good news is that we have that opportunity. That’s the way I look at it.”