Johnson on Stewart-Haas Racing: 'We didn't get their data'
NASCAR team owner Rick Hendrick helped broker the deal that in 2009 created Stewart-Haas Racing, which quickly became one of NASCAR’s elite teams.
Now, six-time Sprint Cup champion and Hendrick Motorsports driver Jimmie Johnson is wondering if that was such a good idea.
“You know that environment is tricky,” Johnson said Friday at Kansas Speedway. “Just to be selfishly speaking on Hendrick Motorsports and the Stewart-Haas relationship, we didn’t get their data. We didn’t share their data, they had ours. So, it was a fantastic situation for them.”
Given the fact that SHR is switching to Fords next year, there’s doubtless some hard feelings from the folks at Hendrick Motorsports, which provides the engines and chassis SHR uses.
But Johnson’s comments were among the first to surface publicly.
“They (SHR) had our best stuff and then they have a huge engineering staff and they can take Hendrick’s best equipment and refine it and make it better,” Johnson said.
Johnson said things got funny between the teams after SHR expanded to four cars at the start of the 2014 season.
“You know before (crew chief) Rodney Childers and Kevin Harvick were at Stewart-Haas it worked pretty good for us,” said Johnson.
“We had a bunch of income for the company, didn’t have to worry about racing for wins or championships against the Stewart-Haas equipment,” said Johnson. “But those guys changed the game and bringing Kurt Busch and Tony himself and all that is there you start questioning the relationship and if it really is the right thing … they really had all the rights to our stuff; we didn’t have the rights to theirs.”
Johnson made no bones about the fact that he doesn’t want to see Hendrick partner with another contending team.
“I think for us, selfishly it is better not to,” Johnson said. “We would always like to have some people running our engines and trying to do durability stuff on new motors that are coming out … but a team at that high of caliber again, I believe we would look really hard before we made that decision again.”
