Hendrick Motorsports' Jimmie Johnson avoids last-lap crash to finish second at Daytona
Hendrick Motorsports' Jimmie Johnson finished second in Saturday night's NASCAR Sprint Cup Coke Zero 400 at Daytona International Speedway. // Lee Holmes, NASCAR Scene
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Jimmie Johnson was fairly certain that something would happen with the three cars ahead of him on the final lap.
A wreck wasn’t necessarily what he had in mind, but Kyle Busch’s incident with Tony Stewart enabled Johnson to snatch a second-place finish in Saturday night's NASCAR Sprint Cup Coke Zero 400 at Daytona International Speedway.
“I had a feeling something would take place coming to the finish and I might be able to improve my position,” he said. “Everybody was content to stay in line, and you're just waiting for the second-place car to make a move on the leader, and those guys started racing and passing each other, and an opportunity came along and I was in the right lane, and off I went.”
The runnerup result was Johnson’s best Daytona finish since winning the 2006 Daytona 500 and kept him third in the point standings, 194 behind Stewart.
Johnson was asked what could be done about the high probability of wrecks at the end of restrictor-plate races, but said there was no way to stop it.
He defended NASCAR’s situation at plate tracks, saying the sport was “damned if we do, damned if we don’t.”
“If you think about the position that the sport is in, [people say] one race it's boring, there's no racing, there's no excitement,” he said. “And then a couple races there's an exciting finish and we're worried about the exciting finish. You know, it's plate racing.”
Johnson said NASCAR has made it clear that drivers can be very aggressive with blocking at restrictor-plate tracks, “and that time it just didn't just work for the 18 [of Busch].”
Said Johnson: “The guys are racing. Tony didn't mean to dump [Busch]. Same thing with Talladega. It's just the product of restrictor-plate racing. Every time we use the restrictor-plate tracks there's questions about how we can keep from having the big wreck and things like that, and you just can't. When you run plates and we run wide open all the way around the track, situations like this come around.”
