Friday, October 28, 2011
Associated Press
CHARLOTTE, N.C.
It’s easy for outsiders to cross Jimmie Johnson off the list of title contenders. They don’t work side by side with the five-time defending NASCAR champion every week, and have no idea just how hard it is to beat him.
It’s a whole different story, though, when those inside the NASCAR garage publicly dismiss him the way rival team owner Jack Roush did two weeks ago at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
“You can’t expect to get a mulligan,” Roush said after Johnson’s 34th-place finish at Charlotte.
“You’ll be very lucky if somebody will give you a chance to make up the whole race. I thought that Jimmie Johnson would be a factor in it and he’s definitely going to have to stand in line and wait for the other folks in the top five to have problems for him to get back in it. He won’t race his way back in it.”
Johnson has taken a tumble since his win three races ago at Kansas pushed him to third in the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship standings. He had a hard wreck at Charlotte that cost him five spots in the standings, but as he headed to Talladega, where he had won in the spring, it was conceivable that he’d make up some ground.
Instead, Johnson and Hendrick Motorsports teammate Dale Earnhardt Jr. waited too long to make their move through the field, and Johnson finished 26th.
He’s now ranked seventh in the standings, 50 points behind leader Carl Edwards, with four races remaining in the Chase.
“We just keep grinding them out,” Johnson said after Talladega. “We’ll just keep fighting. Every position counts. Every spot counts. And I want to finish as high as I can in the points. If it isn’t the championship, I want to finish as high as I can possibly finish.”
Up next is Martinsville Speedway, where Johnson is a six-time winner and considered one of the best active drivers at the Virginia track. He’s got 17 top-10 finishes in 19 career starts, and had been nearly untouchable there since a 35th-place finish in his first career start at the track.