Hendrick’s cars leave NASCAR field in a blur

The quest to rename the Car of Tomorrow is over. Just call it the Car of Hendrick.

While you’re at it, rename the Nextel Cup series the Hendrick Racing League. No other NASCAR teams are in it.

It was Jimmie Johnson’s turn to lead the league of its own Sunday.

He held off teammate Kyle Busch and swept to a series-leading fourth win of the season as Hendrick Motorsports has won seven of the last eight Cup races and all four events run thus far with NASCAR’s new Car of Tomorrow design.

It’s to the point that other teams just go around in circles, dancing in a thunderous chorus line of futility.

Take Sunday’s Hendrick 400 at Richmond International Raceway. It was officially the Jim Stewart 400, named for a race fan who won a Crown Royal whiskey contest.

But from the green flag on in the fourth race for the Car of Tomorrow, it was clear to the 80,000 or so fans who returned from Saturday night’s rainout that this was going to be another Hendrick parade.

It was only a matter of which Car of Hendrick would win.

“It’s tough,” said Joe Gibbs Racing’s Denny Hamlin, who struck a meager blow for NASCAR normalcy by breaking up what almost was a 1-2-3 Hendrick finish. “I’m looking out my windshield, and I see all the Hendrick drivers and me.”

Hamlin edged Hendrick’s Jeff Gordon, who’d started on the pole, for third. Gordon’s car faded late after he’d dominated the early going. He still wound up leading the most laps, 114 of the 400.

“I think we put on good races,” Johnson pleaded when pressed as to whether the Hendrick domination might deflate TV ratings and general interest in NASCAR. “We’re racing hard for the victory, even among our teammates.”

The intra-Hendrick competition is indeed interesting. Johnson and Busch traded the lead four times in the last 105 laps and had some side-by-side duels until Johnson took command with 19 laps to go.

Last week, Johnson finished second to Gordon in a restrictor-plate race -- a different animal from Car of Tomorrow racing -- at Talladega, Ala. That win was Gordon’s second consecutive, coming off a Car of Tomorrow race at Phoenix, and so Gordon seemed to have seized intra-team momentum.

Busch, the youngest Hendrick driver at 22, hasn’t won in five whole races, since the Car of Tomorrow’s debut at Bristol, Tenn., on March 25.

So the poor kid was so victory-starved Sunday that “toward the end, I was screwing myself up by driving in too far,” Busch said of the corners.

Of the Car of Tomorrow, he said: “These things really have to be babied into the corner, and stopped, and turned, and then driven off.”

As Busch and Johnson seesawed for the lead, “I noticed when Kyle was behind me that he was sideways off each corner,” Johnson said. “In front of me he was sideways too, and I knew at some point his tires would start to fade.”

Busch had the lead when the final caution period ended with 20 laps to go but said he knew Johnson was coming.

“I wasn’t quite sure how long it was going to take him to get by me, but I figured he would,” Busch said.

Hamlin felt his Gibbs Chevy was capable of catching the Hendrick cars if he hadn’t run out of laps. But he’d gotten shuffled back on a cycle of green-flag pit stops in midrace and had to come from too far back.

“We had a winning car there at the end; we just didn’t have track position,” said Hamlin, a native of the Richmond suburb of Chesterfield, Va., who’d wanted to win the race to cheer up his home state and friends who are students at Virginia Tech, in the wake of the massacre on that campus last month.

Hamlin’s senior teammate, Tony Stewart, pitted late for four tires at the price of falling back in the field and wound up seventh.

“We’re as good as they are -- better at times,” Hamlin said. “They’ve got all those wins because they haven’t made any mistakes.”

Actually there was one. Gordon was dominating at Texas Motor Speedway on April 15 when he scraped the wall late in the race, fell back to fourth and left Jeff Burton of Richard Childress Racing to win. If not for that, Hendrick would have won eight consecutive by now.

Ed Hinton covers auto racing for Tribune Co. newspapers.