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Sprint Cup
CUP: Title Could Be Decided By Crew Chiefs
The pit bosses are preparing for the pressure of a tight, season-ending race to settle the championship...
Crew chief Chad Knaus (Pictured) has guided Jimmie Johnson to the last four NASCAR Sprint Cup titles. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
With the Sprint Cup championship remarkably close entering Sunday’s Ford 400, the season’s final race, the title could be largely in the hands of the crew chiefs, whose decisions – particularly under late-race pressures – could be pivotal.
Two tires? Four tires? Fuel only? Stretch the fuel load?
Unless one of the three contenders – Denny Hamlin, Jimmie Johnson and Kevin Harvick – has very good fortune early in the race and the other two collapse, it is likely that the crew chiefs will have to make critical moves over the final 100 laps.
Mike Ford (Hamlin), Chad Knaus (Johnson) and Gil Martin (Harvick) are the men on the spot – actually, on the pit wagons – Sunday.
Of the three, Knaus is the only pit boss with a Sprint Cup championship, and he has four. That automatically gives him a leg up Sunday, and he’s generally considered the automaton of the three.
Former champion crew chief Ray Evernham calls Knaus “a gunslinger, a guy who’ll call an audible despite what the head coach tells him to do.”
The downside of this week for Knaus, other than the fact that his driver is 15 points down going into the race, is an odd one – Johnson hasn’t really had to race hard at Homestead over his four championship seasons because he rolled into the season finale in a dominant spot.
“I think the biggest concern that I’ve got currently is that we haven’t gone to Homestead to truly race yet,” Knaus said. “We’ve gone down there with a bit of a protective mindset, so I think that puts us a little bit behind compared to the other guys. Denny, he ran top five most of the race last year. They had a good pit stop at the end, got some good track position, were able to win the race, and that was a good job by them.
“We ran 15th to fifth the majority of the day but never really had to get ourselves in a position where we had to push the car a whole lot. So we haven’t had to be the aggressor there, so I think that puts us a little bit behind the eight-ball. But, then again, when we go to tracks for the first time and try to get aggressive with it, we usually do pretty well. So I think that it could be a good thing, also.”
Knaus said Sunday is about the race, not about all the give-and-take that has appeared in the days and weeks leading to it.
“I guess the more you’re in this sport, the more you learn to become numb to what’s written and what’s published and what’s put out there,” Knaus said. “And Jimmie, along with the majority of the guys on the team – we honestly just don’t, we don’t read what’s written.
“We don’t look at the TV shows. We don’t take part in a lot of that stuff just for the simple fact that it’s just grief and a lot of propaganda. There’s a lot of people that enjoy the drama, but we don’t really get into it a whole lot. We don’t get into the ‘he said, she said’ stuff. We just let our actions speak for what we can do on the race track, and that’s the way we leave it.”
Two tires? Four tires? Fuel only? Stretch the fuel load?
Unless one of the three contenders – Denny Hamlin, Jimmie Johnson and Kevin Harvick – has very good fortune early in the race and the other two collapse, it is likely that the crew chiefs will have to make critical moves over the final 100 laps.
Mike Ford (Hamlin), Chad Knaus (Johnson) and Gil Martin (Harvick) are the men on the spot – actually, on the pit wagons – Sunday.
Of the three, Knaus is the only pit boss with a Sprint Cup championship, and he has four. That automatically gives him a leg up Sunday, and he’s generally considered the automaton of the three.
Former champion crew chief Ray Evernham calls Knaus “a gunslinger, a guy who’ll call an audible despite what the head coach tells him to do.”
The downside of this week for Knaus, other than the fact that his driver is 15 points down going into the race, is an odd one – Johnson hasn’t really had to race hard at Homestead over his four championship seasons because he rolled into the season finale in a dominant spot.
“I think the biggest concern that I’ve got currently is that we haven’t gone to Homestead to truly race yet,” Knaus said. “We’ve gone down there with a bit of a protective mindset, so I think that puts us a little bit behind compared to the other guys. Denny, he ran top five most of the race last year. They had a good pit stop at the end, got some good track position, were able to win the race, and that was a good job by them.
“We ran 15th to fifth the majority of the day but never really had to get ourselves in a position where we had to push the car a whole lot. So we haven’t had to be the aggressor there, so I think that puts us a little bit behind the eight-ball. But, then again, when we go to tracks for the first time and try to get aggressive with it, we usually do pretty well. So I think that it could be a good thing, also.”
Knaus said Sunday is about the race, not about all the give-and-take that has appeared in the days and weeks leading to it.
“I guess the more you’re in this sport, the more you learn to become numb to what’s written and what’s published and what’s put out there,” Knaus said. “And Jimmie, along with the majority of the guys on the team – we honestly just don’t, we don’t read what’s written.
“We don’t look at the TV shows. We don’t take part in a lot of that stuff just for the simple fact that it’s just grief and a lot of propaganda. There’s a lot of people that enjoy the drama, but we don’t really get into it a whole lot. We don’t get into the ‘he said, she said’ stuff. We just let our actions speak for what we can do on the race track, and that’s the way we leave it.”
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