CUP: Friday Pocono Notebook

Sprint Cup

CUP: Friday Pocono Notebook

Jimmie Johnson is looking to win his fourth consecutive NASCAR Sprint Cup championship...

Tom Jensen | Posted June 05, 2009 Long Pond, PA

Jimmie Johnson wants to avoid problems in the pits like he experienced at last weeks Dover race. (Photo: Jason Smith/Getty Images)

FO’, FO’, FO’ Jimmie Johnson hasn’t made a big deal out of it, but he, crew chief Chad Knaus and the rest of the Hendrick Motorsports No. 48 team are quietly getting ready to go after their fourth consecutive NASCAR Sprint Cup championship. In the entire 60-year history of the series, no one’s every done that before, but Johnson & Co. hope to get it done. And with NASCAR’s 26-race regular season already halfway complete, it’s time to start working towards the 10-race, season-ending Chase for the Sprint Cup.

Friday at Pocono Raceway, the El Cajon, Calif., native said he and Knaus are working hard on fine-tuning the Hendrick squad in hopes of avoiding mistakes that could be much costlier at the end of the season than they are now. Last week at Dover International Speedway, for example, a poor late-race pit stop nearly cost Johnson the race. Johnson knows that a similar gaffe during the Chase could be very rough to overcome.

“I’ve been very proud of our cars and there have been some other small issues,” Johnson said Friday. “Everything from me making mistakes on pit road to pit issues and things like that. So I think it's more of us gelling together as a team. There are some new guys on the team. We've done a great job, but to be championship-ready over the next 13 weeks, we just need to polish things up and not have those small mistakes. I think we have a lot of speed in the cars. And at some tracks, we've been a little off. But we've still been able to stay in the top five, top ten, and I feel good about things. There's just some fine-tuning from here and hopefully we'll be where we need to be."

FITTING IN Mark Martin had to be dragged kicking and screaming back into a full-time ride in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series after two years racing part-time. But a lot of pressure from team owner Rick Hendrick got Martin to commit to a full year driving the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet and Martin already has re-upped for 2010.

Friday at Pocono, Martin said he’s adjusting well, albeit slowly, to being a full-time racer again. “I do get more comfortable every week,” said Martin. “There was a lot of different emotions coming into the thing. I hoped that we might get a chance to win a race but I didn’t expect to. I just hoped. You’ve heard that. You’ve heard about all the stuff. Really the only thing that’s really new that I could add to that is that I get more comfortable every weekend.”

Martin, a man well known in the garage for tempering his own expectations, said it was his team who has helped him the most with his transition. “I get more and more comfortable with my team and laughing more and having fun and feeling a little bit less pressure,” he said. “I really feel like that they have my back and I’ve got their back. We’ve proved to each other that we can do this stuff. The day that we have a bad day we’re all going to hold hands and say we’re going to do better tomorrow. So that feels good. You know it could carry a lot of pressure to try to step in there and do the job. Everyone’s expectations of Hendrick Motorsports are very, very high. I’m really happy so far that I’ve been able to do the job.”

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Tom Jensen

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