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How will Joe Gibbs Racing respond to Jimmie Johnson's dominating win?
Jimmie Johnson sent a powerful message with his dominating victory at Charlotte on Sunday.
So how will the Joe Gibbs Racing armada respond at Kansas Speedway, site of Sunday’s Hollywood Casino 400?
JGR’s four drivers combined to win 11 of the 26 races in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series regular season, but so far they are o-for-4 in the Chase for the Sprint Cup, the sanctioning body’s season-ending, 10-race playoff format.
Not that the JGR guys are running badly, mind you. Kyle Busch, Carl Edwards, Denny Hamlin and Matt Kenseth all advanced out of the first round of the Chase and all are in the top eight in points now.
Kenseth and Busch are performing at an especially high level right now.
Kenseth as a pair of runner-up finishes in the Chase and an average finish so far of 4.5, while Busch has a second and a third, and an average finish of 4.75.
Still, Johnson and Kevin Harvick have put their Chevrolets in Victory Lane so far in the Chase, and Martin Truex Jr. has won twice in his Toyota. The JGR squad is still hunting a Chase victory.
Kansas should be a good track for the team and its fleet of Toyotas. Busch won here in the spring, and Kenseth, a two-time Kansas winner, finished a strong fourth.
A JGR win would certainly be a welcome event for the team, but the reality is that in two races, the Chase field will be pared from 12 drivers to eight, so the real key on Sunday is having a good points day, especially since so many Chase drivers had bad ones at Charlotte last Sunday.
“The biggest thing for us is to just don’t beat ourselves right now,” said Busch, the defending Sprint Cup champion. “Don’t make the mistakes that some of these other guys did, try to keep our nose clean. And, if there’s a win, great, get it, and if not, get what you can get -- third, fourth, fifth, whatever it can be.”
Edwards is coming off a 12th-place finish at Kansas, where he had an exhaust system malfunction, a tire failure and a lug nut that got hung up in the air gun. He knows the margin for error is razor-slim at this point in the season.
“We had a lot of speed at Charlotte. We had a lot of luck, too,” said Edwards. “We escaped that race just by a very small margin. We had a lot of problems going on and still salvaged a decent finish.”
So now it’s on to Kansas and we’ll all see how the JGR squad responds on Sunday. How they do -- good or bad -- may well set the tone for the rest of the Chase.
