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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Big Week For Johnson, Hamlin
Jimmie Johnson and Denny Hamlin have five victories each this season...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted September 01, 2010   Charlotte, NC
Denny Hamlin (Right) and Jimmie Johnson (Left) have combined for 10 wins this season. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
For the first half of the NASCAR Sprint Cup season, Jimmie Johnson and Denny Hamlin were the 800-pound gorillas of the garage. For the last two months, they’ve been strictly middleweights.

And that makes Sunday night’s Emory Healthcare 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway a crucial race for both drivers.

Between them, Johnson and Hamlin won 10 of the first 17 races of the season. The subsequent seven races have resulted in a big donut for each man.

In his last nine starts, Hamlin has just two top-fives and six finishes of 14th or worse, while Johnson has had a wretched average finish of 23.29 over his last seven starts. His best finish in those seven races was a 10th at Pocono.

Coming into the season, Johnson and Hamlin were the two big dogs favored to win it all this year. And for the first half of the year, they ran like it.

Now, with the Chase for the Sprint Cup barely two weeks away, each driver knows he has to assert himself anew and flash the race-winning form shown so often in the first half of the year.

Right now, the two are tied for most victories on the season, which means no matter what happens at Atlanta and Richmond, no other driver will surpass them in bonus points heading into the Chase. But Johnson and Hamlin can still pass each other with a victory or two.

Based on history, this weekend favors Johnson. The four-time defending Cup champion has three victories, nine top fives and an average finish of 10.778 in 18 career starts at the fast 1.54-mile Atlanta oval.

Hamlin, in comparison, has just one top-five finish here in 10 starts and an average AMS run of 15.900. Still, he’s optimistic about this weekend and his chances of a strong performance with the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota.

“Atlanta is one of my favorite tracks, even though it’s a place where we haven’t really had the chance to show our best,” said Hamlin. “The track has a ton of history and it’s a place where drivers have to prove themselves because it is so big and really, really fast. It took me a few races to feel as comfortable as I do now, but you can’t ever get too comfortable here because it’s a hard place to master.”

Strategy, Hamlin believes, will be one of the keys to victory. Atlanta is a wide track, with multiple racing grooves, but it can be a difficult place to pass, which puts a premium on track position. That, in turn, starts with a good qualifying effort.

“As a team, I know we bring really good cars to Atlanta and we’ve shown we can run up front here, it’s just having track position when it matters,” said Hamlin. “We want to qualify well and I think if we can get our car right and continue to be good on pit road there is no reason we can’t be fighting for a win at the end.”

Hamlin has one tactical advantage this weekend: The Sprint Cup regular season closes next week at Richmond, his home track and a place where he will be the heavy favorite to win. Therefore, he can gamble a bit more this weekend.

“With one race before the Chase cutoff we just want to go out and try to add a win and that (Chase) bonus that comes with it,” said Hamlin. “We are in a good position but we want more and think this will be a good weekend for us. Obviously heading to Richmond next weekend, which is a home track for me, and a place where we’ve had success in the past, we know we have a big opportunity to go into the Chase with some momentum.”
Jimmie Johnson is a past winner at Atlanta. (Photo: Getty Images)

As for Johnson, he has not been happy with the performance of his No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet at intermediate tracks, especially lately.

“Even at the start of the year when I won a few, I wasn’t the dominant car,” said Johnson. “If you look at California, the No. 29 (Kevin Harvick) was coming and got into the fence and we won. Vegas, we had a solid performance, but the No. 24 (Jeff Gordon) dominated all day and we got him at the end with some tire strategy. We knew then that we needed to go to work and find some speed and we’ve been working all summer on the big tracks to find it.”

That effort remains a work in progress.

“Not where we want to be yet, but fortunately we still have some time," Johnson said. "Before we get to a mile-and-a-half track in the Chase that counts, we have a little bit more time. We made some decisions recently on what type of car we want to run, what packages we want to run, and we’re committed to our direction at this point moving forward.”

With that in mind, Johnson looks at Sunday night’s AMS tilt as a critical barometer of the team’s performance.

“If we get to Atlanta and see that we don’t have the speed — and Atlanta hasn’t been our best track for us with the COT — but once we get in the Chase ... if we got there and we don’t run like we need do we’ll step back and punt. Right now we’re making decisions on what we’re going to take into the Chase and do everything we can with that.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100 and e-mail him at Jensen is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of Speed,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association and an NMPA Writer of the Year.

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