FORT WAYNE – I’m so sick of Jimmie Johnson.
– A standard lament
He is a contortionist’s dream these days, the man in the 29 car.
On the one hand Kevin Harvick has to look back over his shoulder to see a living soul, because he’s clear of the field in the Sprint Cup chase by 103 points and hasn’t been anywhere else since the first week of June. It’s the dream season that follows the nightmare of 2009, when he was 19th in points and finished 30th or worst 10 times.
And yet as he looks over his shoulder, he also sees what lies ahead. It is the 48 car, back there in third after 19 races. It is the 48 car: still a plume of dust in the distance ahead, as it has been for four years now.
Blast that Jimmie Johnson. How can he be behind and ahead all at the same time?
“How confident are you that you can unseat Jimmie Johnson this year?” someone asked Harvick at Daytona earlier this month.
“Well, I think until somebody beats him … until we get to Homestead and that happens, he’s still the guy to beat,” Harvick replied.
As ever.
Brian France sees the forest and not just the trees as well as anyone. That’s how he knows his sport isn’t out of the woods yet.
“The economy is what it is,” France, NASCAR’s chairman and CEO, said in his midseason state-of-the-sport news conference this month. “It’s still difficult. It was difficult six months ago. It doesn’t appear to have improved that much for our fan base, a lot of our corporate sponsors.”
There is more, of course. Attendance and viewership continue to lag, thanks to a stubbornly high jobless rate, the key area for discretionary spending. And the money demographic – males 18 to 35 – is slowing leaking air.
In response, NASCAR has tried or is thinking of trying a variety of remedies: moving Sunday start times back to the traditional 1 p.m. Eastern, going old-school in letting drivers settle their differences on the track, tinkering further with the Chase. The only thing it can’t do, it seems, is stop Jimmie Johnson.
No one will come out and say his dominance – four straight Sprint Cups and three wins in four years at the Brickyard 400 – has hurt the sport, but it has given it a certain air of inevitability. And inevitability is the blood enemy of drama.
That’s why there was a stir in the garage area when Johnson hit a seven-race minislump in the spring, finishing 30th or worse three times and no better than sixth while slipping to seventh in the points. But then he won back-to-back at Infineon and New Hampshire, where he kept his cool after Kurt Busch punted him out of the lead with five laps left.
“Yeah, inside the car, I was livid,” Johnson said. “Almost lost it at one point.”
That he didn’t was a tribute to crew chief Chad Knaus, who knew from the silence on the radio that steam was issuing from Johnson’s ears and immediately began talking his guy down.
And it was a tribute to Johnson and his lightning ability to regain his cool.
“Experience helps you maintain and do the right things in those moments,” he said later.
“I was out of my rhythm, out of sync, furious. So I went back to my rhythm and doing my thing, and when I got two or three corners behind me, a lot of that frustration went by, left. I … knew that if I didn’t drive my rhythm and how the car needed to be driven, I couldn’t even have a chance to win the race.”
That kind of self-awareness surfaced at Charlotte, too, in the middle of Johnson’s “slump.” It’s a prime reason why the word comes garnished with quotation marks, and why everyone’s who’s sick of Jimmie Johnson isn’t likely to get well anytime soon.
“I told myself after Charlotte that, you know, I can’t drive at eleven-tenths, it’s not possible,” Johnson said at New Hampshire. “I need to drive the car to its ability; give Chad and the guys a chance to work on it, to bring the car home in one piece. Bringing it home on a hook with 30-something points isn’t going to do anybody any good.”
Well. Except for 42 others.
Tony Eury Jr. is Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s cousin, and until May he had been his crew chief for the better part of the last decade. So he knows how this works.
Take New Hampshire a month ago, for instance.
“I’m sitting there watching (Junior),” Eury said this month. “He’s following Jimmie right up through the track. I’m sitting there working. I get out, Jimmie wins. I look, (Junior) finished 10th.”
“I finished seventh,” Earnhardt said. “I stayed there, and he kept going.”
As ever.
