Jimmie Johnson shrugs off team's mistakes, confident he can advance to NASCAR round of eight
KANSAS CITY, Kan. — The mistakes were uncharacteristic for a seven-time NASCAR championship team.
A lug nut issue caused a slow pit stop at Charlotte two weeks ago. A spotter’s communication error last week resulted in a 24th-place finish at Talladega.
Both pit road mishaps put Jimmie Johnson’s Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series team in a precarious position going into Sunday’s Hollywood Casino 400 at Kansas Speedway, an elimination race in the playoffs.
Johnson sits in eighth place in the standings, only seven points ahead of the cutoff line. But the defending Cup champion did not lack for confidence on Friday at Kansas Speedway, where he has won three times, including a playoff race in 2011 and the spring race in 2015.
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“It’s a tough position to be in,” Johnson said, “but this has been a great track for us. I think back to last spring and how many cars we passed during the course of the day. We’ll have a great performance. We’re going to need to have a great day. It will be great to get back to victory lane and get that momentum going back in the right direction.
“We’re a team that has always thrived on adversity. Whenever we’ve been backed up into a corner, we have always stepped up and delivered. All the members of the 48 team love a challenge. We’re not even close to losing that desire and fight to compete for a win and race for a championship.”
Johnson said his team has learned from the mistakes it made the last two weeks.
“ When I think of the Charlotte pit stop itself, and I think of Talladega and the mistake there,” he said, “really all mistakes come from guys trying as hard as they can. I personally have sympathy for that. The guys are just trying to do the best job they can and everybody makes mistakes.
“I mean, I make plenty of them … it’s hard for me to jump on somebody over that. What I ask of myself is to learn from those lessons and try not to repeat them. I know that my teammates do the same thing.”
Johnson, 42, is the only driver to have qualified for NASCAR’s playoffs since a post-season format was implemented in 2014, and he’s won at least one playoff race every year. But the three-race elimination rounds that were introduced in 2014 leaves little wiggle room for mistakes.
Johnson almost has to win Sunday in order to advance to the Round of 8 and defend the title he won last year in the season finale at Homestead.
“Yeah, it is much more circumstantial now than before when you had a 10-race Chase to worry about or the entire season,” Johnson said. “There was a different flow to it. Now you’ve got to stay alive and move to the next round and then within that round of races or Homestead itself there is just so much that can change.
“It’s all circumstances. That gives us some optimism . . . we haven’t had the exact year that we’ve wanted. The No. 78 (Martin Truex, Jr.) has really kind of been in control of the year and I think we are all jealous of the situation those guys are in. But I keep telling myself, what happened last year, we have to make the final four and then in Homestead who knows what will happen in that race and last year is proof of that.”