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The great drivers win races they have no business winning and they rarely give one away. In Atlanta, Jimmie Johnson literally took the victory from the other contenders by racing his final green flag stint longer on worn tires on a day when driving a loose, sliding car was the name of the game. Or, on a day when a guy like Dale Earnhardt Sr., the late king of car control back in the days of bias ply tires, might have won.
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After an overtime restart at the finish, the victory gave Johnson 76 career victories, tying him with Earnhardt Sr. Having won six Sprint Cup championships, Johnson's got one more championship to go before he ties "The Intimidator" in that category.
In case anybody thinks five straight titles and six over the course of eight seasons isn't enough, the Atlanta winner reminded everyone why he's the best in stock cars in what could be termed the Johnson era. And, noted Hendrick Motorsports owner Rick Hendrick, Johnson has done it without knocking other drivers out of the way with his bumper or fenders.
"I think Dale was more aggressive," said Hendrick. "He got that he didn't get that Intimidator title by being nice to everybody. If he got to you, he'd move you and I think he intimidated a lot of people, and he was a heck of a race car driver. He could do things that I didn't see a lot of people do.
"The one thing about Jimmie Johnson," continued Hendrick, "he doesn't put a fender on anybody. He does it clean. If they're faster he lets them go, and he treats everybody with a lot of respect."
It's not as if Johnson never has contact with other drivers. But his style is far more surgical, said Dale Earnhardt Jr., who finished several car lengths back in second in Atlanta in the overtime finish. The first time Johnson caught Earnhardt Jr.'s eye was in the All-Star race at the Charlotte Motor Speedway.
"He went three wide in the middle of Turns 3 and 4 and he turned sideways and never lifted and just kind of banged," he said. "He drove the quarter panel on the guy outside and the fender (was) laid on the door of the guy on the inside and beat them both off the corner. I thought, 'Man, it's amazing the car control he has.'"
Hendrick, whose team won its first race in 1984, has been around the sport long enough to know what goes around comes around. His team initially had trouble beating Earnhardt Sr. to championships and the movie "Days of Thunder" mimicked the wars between "The Intimidator" and Hendrick's driver Geoff Bodine.
After coming up on "the short end of the stick" in the battles with Earnhardt Sr. in the mid-1980s, Hendrick signed Jeff Gordon, the driver who put an end to Earnhardt Sr.'s championship streak in 1995. Less than decade later, he signed Johnson at the behest of Chevrolet's racing manager Herb Fishel, bringing the California driver from stadium truck racing to the Sprint Cup.
Since then, Johnson's tail-happy, dirt trackin' style is the closest thing on the superspeedways to Earnhardt Sr., whose combination of car control and his willingness to dare drivers to race him the same way proved a formidable combination.
In Atlanta, Johnson's one-and-only crew chief in the Sprint Cup, Chad Knaus, once again gave the No. 48 Chevy team a tough-to-beat combination. The longest running driver-crew chief relationship since Dale Inman and Richard Petty, Johnson and Knaus stole a march on the high banks. By calling Johnson into the pits with 49 laps to go, Knaus gambled that his driver's smoothness would enable him to go to the finish on a day when pit stops generally occurred every 40 laps due to tires getting literally ragged around the edges.
Knaus made a split-second decision from the Hendrick war wagon. "I looked down at the monitors, saw where they were at, saw the lap counts, saw that we had 49 laps to go," said Knaus. "I knew that everybody was pitting at 40 laps and I was like, 'Well, we're going to see how crazy these (other teams) are and if they're comfortable making this type of call.' And they weren't, so it worked out."
Johnson wasn't so sure about making it to the finish on one set of tires. "We've talked a lot that we want to be aggressive, so I knew when he pulled me to pit lane that we were going to be on the early side," said Johnson. "And then I made lap after lap after lap and no one else was on pit road, and I was like, 'Are we going to two-stop it from here? What's going on?' I didn't realize how aggressive he was willing to be."
A 14-second lead over Kevin Harvick, who waited too long for fresh tires and fell that far behind as a result, was too much to overcome as Johnson waggled through the sun-dappled high-banked corners late in his stint. Despite the slipping and sliding in the new era of low downforce and Goodyear tires with more "give up", he maintained a five-second gap.
It was the Stewart-Haas Racing Chevy of Harvick, who led nine times for 131 laps, that wore out its tires. Once the overtime occurred due to a caution with three laps to go, Johnson entered the pits first and carried that advantage to victory.
There are those who think Johnson, and Gordon before him, led to too much tame driving on the superspeedways in the post-Earnhardt Sr. era. But in many respects, Earnhardt's death 15 years ago on the final lap of the Daytona 500 intimidated all the drivers about the disadvantages of overly aggressive driving.
Johnson, who was a Jeff Gordon fan while growing up, was the right man at the right time when he arrived at NASCAR's highest echelon in 2001, just months after Earnhardt Sr.'s fatal crash. (Ironically, it was Harvick who replaced Earnhardt Sr., winning his first race in the Richard Childress team's Chevy in Atlanta in 2001, edging Gordon by inches in a photo finish.)
When Gordon tied Earnhardt Sr.'s record of 76 wins, he flew a flag with Earnhardt Sr.'s No. 3 on it during his post-race celebration and was roundly booed by fans in Phoenix. So Johnson pondered the possibility of a record-tying victory during last season and consulted his Hendrick teammate Earnhardt Jr.
"You know, I talked to Dale six months ago or a while ago, last year at some point about it, and I also talked to Jeff. I was shocked that he had a little bit of backlash when he flew the 3 flag in Phoenix. And I was like, 'Really, why?'
"So I just made sure that I spoke to Junior a little bit, and he shared with me that he really feels like his dad would have had a ton of respect for me and would have enjoyed racing against me, and we would have had a great friendship. Kind of covering that base with Dale a while ago helped me."
Given the added pressure of overtime, Johnson said he forgot about what a 76th career victory would mean until the race was over. He eventually did a pass in front of the grandstands on the front straight with three fingers raised in salute.
"I saw a lot of threes coming back," said Johnson, as smooth as ever while riding the ragged edge.
