It looked bleak for Johnson until he snatched a 7th title
Among the drivers regularly mentioned as all-time greats are several-Junior Johnson, Curtis Turner, Fireball Roberts, et al. -who never won any championships at NASCAR’s premier level. Standard procedure in NASCAR races is for drivers involved in any wreck to visit the infield care center for a checkup, but there’s no rule that says the driver must ride there.
He was leading when Dylan Lupton brought out a caution with 15 laps remaining, and it forced Edwards to hold off the competition on a restart with 10 to go.
“He come from last doing that?”
Logano’s team patched him up and he gave it a good try, finishing fourth, but everyone cleared a path for the best driver of this era.
The best was yet to come.
Johnson took the lead 3 laps to the finish, including the NASCAR Overtime after Ricky Stenhouse Jr. found trouble to, complete an improbable comeback and the 7th title. Oh, yeah, and the one that elevated Johnson, 41, into the company of stock-car legends Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt as the only men to win seven season titles. Both Tony Stewart and Brian Scott made what is expected to be their last-career Sprint Cup Series starts Sunday.
“You missed it”, Johnson said. I just risked too much.
“Then it changed so quick at the end”. As Johnson motored toward a record-tying seventh Sprint Cup title, his devoted friend and team leader put aside the normally calm-cool-and-collected facade and showed all the emotion you would expect of someone who was watching history.
No stranger to the championship stage, Stewart greeted Johnson warmly during post-race ceremonies and knowing Stewart’s passion for helmet collecting, Johnson pulled his helmet out of the winning vehicle and handed it over to the retiring NASCAR star. He wanted that seventh championship and he got that seventh championship done.
Jimmie Johnson won the Ford EcoBoost 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway on Sunday to join stock vehicle legends Petty and Earnhardt on the top rung of NASCAR’S ladder.
“Just proud of Jimmie”, Earnhardt said. “Dad would think he’s such a badass”.
The race was red-flagged, stopped immediately regardless of the cars’ position on the track. “And you can’t go to eight until you get to seven”. “There’s a lot of circumstance that played into it, but he put himself in that position”.
Larson maintained the lead in the pits and Edwards lined up on the inside of the front row for the restart.
But Edwards’ attempt to block a fast-charging Joey Logano triggered a nine-car wreck and instantly took him out of the championship equation. After he passed Kyle Busch with 25 laps left, it looked like he was about to race his way to his first championship…but that’s not how things turned out. “I mean, I had this insane weird calmness through the last couple of weeks and then even through the race amongst all the chaos we dealt with, and the fact that we ran behind those guys all night long – fifth, sixth, wherever we ran – there was just some calmness that was in me”.
Perhaps that, more than anything, is the legacy of Johnson and his incredible team.
“It’s just one of those deals, dude”, Knaus said.
The yellow flew again, and crew chief Adam Stevens called Busch in for tires.
Added Johnson’s owner, Rick Hendrick: “Jimmie is everything but vanilla. I felt like that was our race and our championship, but, hey, this is how racing goes”. “We had the auto to win there and I know that I did everything in my power to win the race”.
“If you look at what’s going on in the National Football League and the viewership, all the sponsors watch that”, team owner Rick Hendrick said.
Johnson won the race and title despite a rough start to the weekend (he struggled in qualifying) and day. Hendrick didn’t take her seriously. “I was actually stunned because we had so many ups and downs in that race”.
Stewart will spent his first day of semi-retirement the same way he usually does, off-road riding in an all-terrain vehicle in the middle of nowhere, which was coincidentally what injured him last winter.