Johnson cuts Gordon’s lead

HAMPTON, Ga. -- Sunday’s Pep Boys 500 was a study in why Hendrick Motorsports teammates Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon have turned this year’s Nextel Cup championship into an intramural duel.

Johnson’s crew chief, Chad Knaus, made a split-second audible call for two tires in the pits on their final stop, putting Johnson in position to grab his eighth win of the season.

Gordon’s crew nursed a fitful Chevrolet from the brink of what could have been a disastrous day, and brought him home seventh so that he maintained the lead in NASCAR’s Chase playoffs -- although now by only nine points over Johnson.

Also in classic Hendrick form, Johnson, a native of El Cajon, Calif., which is in the area ravaged by wildfires in the last week, donated his entire winner’s share, $349,561, to the American Red Cross, to be earmarked for fire victims in California. Team owner Rick Hendrick and Atlanta Motor Speedway Chairman Bruton Smith will match Johnson’s gift, so “we’ll be sending well over $1 million,” Johnson said.

What had been a yawner of a race went wild with seven laps to go in the regulation 325, and continued into green-white-checkered overtime.

A third Hendrick driver, Kyle Busch, had been dominating the late stages of the race when his crew had trouble getting his right front tire off in the pits. Noticing their ruinous delay, Knaus changed his call from four to two tires to get Johnson out in second place, behind Denny Hamlin, who had chosen not to pit.

Then on the restart, Hamlin’s car ran out of gas and he was unable to accelerate, causing cars to stack up behind him and bringing out another caution to send the race into overtime.

Johnson led, with Carl Edwards and Dale Earnhardt Jr. bunched up behind him, threatening to snatch the win. But in the first turn on that final restart, Earnhardt’s left rear tire fell off and he crashed, freezing the field for keeps with Johnson at the front before Edwards had a chance to challenge.

Johnson figured he had the situation handled regardless -- even though Edwards had beaten him here in a similar scenario in 2005.

“I got a really good restart,” Johnson said. “I had four or five car lengths on him getting into Turn 1, and our car was the best it had been all day. I do know that Carl would have been committed to running wide open and doing whatever it took to win the race.”

But his Chevrolet had been “a fifth- to eighth-place car throughout the day,” Johnson said, “and circumstances really worked out for us at the end, and we took advantage of it. . . .

“Chad’s pit call there at the end is really what put us in contention to win the race.”

“The only way for us to gain on the 24 [Gordon, in the Chase], as competitive as they’re running, is for us to go for the wins,” Knaus said. “When that caution came out [with seven laps to go], we knew we didn’t have a car capable of winning the race at that point. But usually late in the race, cautions breed cautions, so track position was going to be important.

“We kind of called an audible right there, took two tires and went with it.”

Gordon languished between 10th and 20th for much of the race, but late, his crew finally corrected his car’s extremely loose, or oversteering, condition.

“We were too far behind at that point,” he said.

Although his Chase lead was chopped from 53 points to nine, “I’m just happy to have a points lead right now, after the day we had,” Gordon said. “All I’m focused on and concerned about right now is trying not to have the bad day.

“And for a little while, it looked like today was going to be that day. So to come back and finish seventh, even though Jimmie won, it’s still a great day for us.”

Clint Bowyer finished sixth Sunday but gained only four points on Gordon and is now 111 back with three races left.

“We’ll just keep putting the pressure on -- now we’re in striking distance -- and we’ll see what happens,” Johnson said.

“When we had that 53-point lead coming in, we didn’t feel like we had a lead, and the pressure was on,” Gordon said. “Now we’ve got a nine-point lead and the pressure’s on even more.”

But, “They [Johnson’s branch of the team] are not going to get it easy, if they get it,” Gordon said. Johnson is trying for his second consecutive title, and Gordon for the fifth of his career. “We’re going to make them work for it. And they’re going to make us work for it too.”

Said Hendrick, who has to referee the friendly but ever intensifying duel, “We’ll see if our nerves can stand three more events.”

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Ed Hinton covers auto racing for Tribune newspapers.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The Chase

Nextel Cup standings through 33 of 36 races:

*--* Pl. Driver Points Behind 1. Jeff Gordon 6,201 -- 2. Jimmie Johnson 6,192 -9 3. Clint Bowyer 6,090 -111 4. Carl Edwards 5,940 -261 5. Tony Stewart 5,879 -322 6. Kyle Busch 5,873 -328 7. Kevin Harvick 5,809 -392 8. Jeff Burton 5,801 -400 9. Kurt Busch 5,782 -419 10. Denny Hamlin 5,777 -424 *--*