ALL-STAR: Johnson Going For ‘Everything’

Sprint Cup

ALL-STAR: Johnson Going For ‘Everything’

Jimmie Johnson is a two-time winner of NASCAR's Sprint All-Star Race at Charlotte Motor Speeway....

Mike Hembree | Posted May 18, 2010 Charlotte, NC

Jimmie Johnson is fourth in the NASCAR Sprint Cup standings. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Jimmie Johnson could be rolling into Saturday night’s Sprint All-Star Race with the momentum from a victory last Sunday at Dover International Speedway.

Instead, he and his No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports teammates are still looking back at what happened on the last round of pit stops in the Autism Speaks 400 – specifically at Johnson’s pit-road speeding penalty that cost him a lap and a shot at racing ultimate winner Kyle Busch for the victory.

For a team that has become known for near-perfection, it was an odd occurrence.

“We definitely analyze it,” Johnson said Tuesday. “We don’t want to not learn from our mistakes, but we can’t beat ourselves up too badly. We missed it by a few hundredths of a mile per hour.

“We enter pit road like we do the race track. We try to get everything we can from yellow line to yellow line. That includes getting onto pit road, the pit stop and leaving. We certainly are pushing it as hard as we can, and, unfortunately, we missed it by a few hundredths.”

This week, Johnson returns to a track – Charlotte Motor Speedway – where he has enjoyed amazing success. He’ll be in back-to-back events – the Sprint All-Star Race and next weekend’s Coca-Cola 600. If the first – Saturday’s All-Star event – doesn’t produce a victory, it will serve, Johnson said, as an educational device.

A pit-road speeding penalty cost Jimmie Johnson a shot at victory at Dover. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

“It’s nice not to have to worry about points, but it’s important to learn,” he said. “Teams use it to test for the 600, although we’ve already had a test session at Charlotte, so that has helped.

“We feel like we have an idea of what we want. If we show up and that doesn’t work, we can try a couple of options. We have a good idea of the basics the car needs from the geometry and spring packages and so forth. I would assume that the majority of the cars will be fine because of the test session we had.”

Even an All-Star car that’s really hooked up in practice can provide opportunities for the following week’s race, Johnson said.

“If you show up and you’re super fast and you have this idea and you want to use it in race conditions but you’ve been afraid to try it in a points situation, you can try it this weekend,” he said.

The All-Star race will be run in segments of 50, 20, 20 and 10 laps, and there will be a mandatory pit stop prior to the final segment. In last year’s race, the segments prior to the final run of 10 laps were merely prelude to the madness, as drivers such as Kyle Busch, Matt Kenseth and Jeff Gordon raced on the raw edge before Tony Stewart emerged with the victory.

Johnson, who was bumped into a spin during the early laps of that last segment last year and finished 13th, expects to be in the rush to the finish this week. He has a pair of wins – in 2003 and 2006 – in the All-Star race.

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEEDtv.com and has been covering motorsports for 28 years. He has written several books on NASCAR, including "NASCAR: The Definitive History of America's Sport" and "Then Tony Said To Junior: The Best NASCAR Stories Ever Told". He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.

2010 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series All-Star Week • The Stars Come Out. The Gloves Come Off. • Saturday, May 22nd at 7 pm ET

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Mike Hembree

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