As 2014 enters the month of May, there continues to be one thing missing from the NASCAR Sprint Cup season — six-time NASCAR Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson has a zero in the win column.
Statistically, Johnson is off to one of his worst starts in his career. It’s been over 10 years since “Superman” has gone this far into a season without a victory. The last time was 2003, his sophomore season, when it wasn’t until the Coca-Cola 600 on Memorial Day weekend — the 12th race of the season — when Jimmie took a checkered flag.
The furthest Johnson has gone into a championship-winning season and not won a race was 2008, when it took until the eighth race of the year at Phoenix before he emerged victorious.
But, he will win eventually, right?
The inevitability of Johnson winning may not be a certainty after all. The tires this year have given JJ problems. He’s been fast this year, but tires have been the 48 team’s kryptonite in 2014. The performance has been there. Johnson has had the speed to contend for wins, but when race-winning efforts continue to go down the drain as they have in Fontana, Martinsville and Darlington, one has to wonder if that trend will continue.
Of course, every team this year has struggled with tires — just look at the Saturday night race at Richmond. Teams couldn’t go more than 60 laps at a time without suffering a fiery blowout that not only cost them a right front tire, but bits and pieces of the suspension and brakes. But the 48 team has been unusually unprepared for the current tire situation.
Looking at races at Bristol, Fontana and Richmond, a big part of those issues can be traced to the setups that crew chief Chad Knaus uses for the 48 car. The low ride heights allowed by NASCAR, combined with the increased downforce package in 2014, has certainly left Johnson and Knaus scratching their heads.
We also know Jimmie loves running wild setups, ones that create such a loose car that he’s one of the only drivers in the garage that can hang onto it. As a six-time champion, it is surprising the number of times the 48 has simply gone around on his own. It just happened this last weekend at Talladega, at a place where all a driver needs to focus on in the corners is keeping his car within the confines of the pack.
Johnson has received fan criticism for spinning out by himself, but a lot of that is his car setups, and I think the setups are doing him in. Those setups seem to be hard on the tires, like when he lost a sure victory at Fontana due to the aggressive setup (and the backstretch bumps) that led to a tire failure late in the race.
If Chad Knaus continues to give his driver aggressive car setups, he will continue to run into problems in the race. And I don’t know if they can afford to do that with the tires Goodyear has brought to the table this year.
If there’s someone that Johnson can turn to for advice, it’s the four-time champion in the garage stall next to him — or rather, the garage stall reserved for the current points leader.
Jeff Gordon has been a beneficiary of the recent tire experiment. The veteran has demonstrated a conservative consistency in his later years, one that hurts him on the inevitable late-race restarts. But his ability to conserve tires that was so important during his early years in the mid-90’s has come back into play to some extent. After 10 races in 2014, Gordon has scored a driver rating (a formula combining a number of performance statistics) of over 100 in seven of them — including three in a row of above 120 — and has come close to victory in three of the five races that tire wear has been one of the leading concerns.
In the five races that have seen exceptional tire degradation, Gordon has averaged a driver rating of 114.54, whereas Johnson has averaged 101.34. When it comes to getting the maximum out of a set of tires, Gordon has proved he is one of the very best, and if Johnson should seek help, it needs to be his teammate. The same guy who helped give him his start in the Cup series.
His season depends on it.
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