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HEMBREE: Johnson – Light To Dark To Light
Jimmie Johnson’s Kansas Rally Keeps Chase Tight…
Mike Hembree  |  Posted October 22, 2012   Kansas City, KS
SPEED.com NASCAR Editor Mike Hembree is a veteran, award-winning motorsports journalist. (File Photo)
Jimmie Johnson went from almost winning a race to almost losing a shot at another championship and back to almost winning a race again. All in the course of a single race day.

For a race that many projected to be a mostly boring, single-groove affair that would hold little interest, Sunday’s Hollywood Casino 400 at Kansas Speedway produced exactly the sort of mayhem and wild tangents that allowed Johnson to look like first a king, then a pauper and finally again a hero.

Johnson led 44 consecutive laps in the first half of the race, and you could tell by the worried faces along pit row that a sense of dread was spreading down the line. Johnson built a relatively comfortable lead, and the foundation was being constructed for a familiar storyline. Johnson would go on to win the race, possibly take the point lead, ride off into the sunset and race away from all pretenders on the way to a sixth championship.

Then a weird thing happened. The track that ate Kansas turned out to be fierce enough to consume a five-time champion, too, and Johnson slammed hard into the fourth-turn wall on lap 137, causing the sixth in what became a parade of cautions.

The wreck looked bad. The force of the crash bashed in the rear of Johnson’s Chevrolet, and the first thoughts were that Johnson might be out of the race or at least be banished to the garage area for extensive, expensive repairs.

He had gone from stud to dud in a heartbeat, and suddenly his championship hopes look quite a bit dimmer.

But clearer heads prevailed. Crew chief Chad Knaus, a killer technician in these situations, directed Johnson to pit road, and the 48 crew swarmed the rear of the car like ants reworking a kicked-over hill. Remarkably, after a series of pit stops under the caution, the crew returned the car to raceable condition while also keeping Johnson on the lead lap.

He dropped to 29th, but the car, despite the hard hit, was massaged enough to run manageable lap times, and Johnson began climbing through the field.

He ultimately finished ninth, a position that would have been difficult to predict as his car was rocketing into the wall earlier in the afternoon.

The end result was that Johnson held serve. He entered the race in second place in the Chase standings, seven points behind Brad Keselowski. He ended the race in exactly the same spot and with exactly the same deficit.

Keselowski, who noticed Johnson’s reassembled car on the track after the accident, must have been startled to finish the race and find Johnson lurking in his shadow.

For Keselowski, having Johnson in a lurking stance is not a good thing. With four races left, including Martinsville, a Johnson capital, that is not comforting.

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 30 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.
The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED
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