FORT WORTH, Texas (November 3, 2013) – Five-time NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion Jimmie Johnson put on an utterly dominating display to gain control of the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup championship with a victory in Sunday’s AAA Texas 500 at Texas Motor Speedway.
Johnson (No. 48 Lowe’s Chevrolet) led 255 of the 334 laps to become the first back-to-back winner of the AAA Texas 500 since it joined the Chase schedule in 2005 and break the championship deadlock with Matt Kenseth (No. 20 Home Depot let’s Do This Toyota). Johnson now owns a seven-point lead over Kenseth, who finished fourth and gained a bonus point for leading a lap, with two races remaining.
The win was Johnson’s sixth of the season and third at Texas Motor Speedway, which moved him into a tie with Carl Edwards for most career Sprint Cup victories at the venue. It also was his 66th career victory, 24 of which have come in Chase competition.
The Sprint Cup Series heads to Phoenix and then Homestead in the next two weeks to close out the season and Johnson is expecting the championship to go down to the final lap of the finale.
“I have been watching a lot of MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) fighting lately, and you’ll fall into a rhythm and think that somebody has got the fight won and it doesn’t end that way,” Johnson said. “That’s how this is going to be. Matt didn’t have maybe the best day and still finished fourth. This thing is going to go to the last lap at Homestead, and it is going to come down to mistakes. I’m very excited about our performance and what we did here. We’ll enjoy this, but there is still two weeks of very hard racing ahead of us.”
Dale Earnhardt Jr. (No. 88 AMP Energy Gold/7-Eleven Chevrolet) gave Hendrick Motorsports a 1-2 sweep while Penske Racing’s Joey Logano (No. 22 AAA Ford) was third in the 501-mile race that featured 28 lead changes among 10 drivers.
Johnson, who started third, grabbed the lead from polesitter Carl Edwards (No. 99 Aflac Ford) on Lap 10 and exhibited early in the race that he would be contending for a victory barring any misfortune.
The lead swapped hands 13 times through the first 91 laps before Johnson began to show his muscle. He took the lead on Lap 92 from Brad Keselowski (No. 2 Miller Lite Ford) and from that point on he led all but 23 laps, most of them by virtue of the cycling of pit stops and a slow pit stop by Johnson’s crew. Meanwhile, Kenseth, despite an ill-handling car, was running second to Johnson at the mid-race point before he made a key mistake during a round of pit stops.
Kenseth was called for speeding on pit lane during his stop on Lap 173 and was issued a pass-through penalty that dropped him from second to 16th. Kenseth utilized a timely caution on Lap 189 to gain track position on the restart and then methodically moved through the field to gain a top-five finish and stay in the championship hunt.
Jeff Gordon (No, 24 Drive To End Hunger Chevrolet) and Kevin Harvick (No. 29 Budweiser Chevrolet) were not as fortunate. Gordon, who came to Texas in third and 27 points behind the co-leaders, had a tire go down that sent him hard into the Turn 1 wall. He finished 38th and fell to sixth in the championship, 69 points back. Harvick, who was fourth and 28 out, had a solid run as he finished sixth, but he is a distant 40 points back in third.
The only moment of alarm for Johnson was when he said he felt a possible vibration with about 20 laps remaining, but it proved to be nothing as he still cruised to a 4.39-second margin of victory over Earnhardt Jr. It was the fifth runner-up finish of the season for Earnhardt Jr. and third in the Chase, allowing him to move from seventh to fifth in the championship.
“We want to put forward a good account of ourselves in the Chase because you’re in there for a reason and don’t want to be an also ran,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “So we feel like we’re doing a lot of good work and getting really close to probably breaking through and getting a win. We’ve only got two more opportunities at it, but real pleased with just the speed of the car.”
Johnson’s performance, however, was not the most dominating in Sprint Cup competition at Texas Motor Speedway. That belongs to Tony Stewart, who led a record 278 laps en route to a victory in the 2006 edition of the race.
“It was a great, great race car and we were really buttoned up which was the cool one,” Johnson said. “There were a couple moments in the race that we had to work on the car from a balance standpoint. There was one cycle of pit stops that we came out fourth or fifth and we had to drive back through those guys.”
