Lesson learned: Jimmie Johnson says it’s time for five-time champs to ‘start over’
Jimmie Johnson says that while he failed to win a sixth consecutive Cup title in 2011, the season proved to be a learning experience for himself as well as his Hendrick Motorsports team. // Sam Cranston, NASCAR Illustrated
His incredible run through the record book now halted, temporarily or otherwise, Jimmie Johnson said he looks back on the 2011 season as a time of learning.
And the lessons it provided, he said, should help make him a better driver in 2012.
“It’s been a very good year to strip things down and look at what I do and what the team does and figure out how to be stronger in my individual role,” the five-time NASCAR Cup champion said, “and then how I can be a better part of the team and help make the team better.”
What he does is win. But it’s been more than that. Johnson is more than just another talented driver behind the wheel. His ability to understand and adapt, to improve and improvise has been as much a reason for his success as bullet-fast race cars and unerring pit strategy.
His achievements, and those of his No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports team, did more than just drive the team to reach unimagined goals, they also forced others to adapt.
Now, Johnson says, it is he and his team that must adapt. Because, he noted, the sport doesn’t sit still.
“The game has changed a lot. For five years we tried to re-invent ourselves, we tried to do things differently,” he said. “But there are some things that we couldn’t get away from because – why would we? It was working.
“As we were going through that, every driver and team was studying us and figuring out what we were doing. I really think it’s a matter of starting over in a lot of areas.”
Starting over means evolving, looking for better ways to do his job. Or ways to do his job better. From giving feedback following practice sessions to relaying similar information to crew chief Chad Knaus in the heat of a race.
“There’s a lot that I’ve thought about and once I get into the season I’ll know more and really be able to work through those things,” he said. “But I feel like over the five years of winning championships, there are certain things, even as basic as the way I approach a weekend and the notes I take and what I do from a driver’s standpoint, that’s all been well documented. Every driver does it now. Were they doing it then? No.
“I need to find new ways to do a better job as the driver of the 48 car and that’s what this year is about for me. That’s what this offseason was about for me. Really, the first half of the season is going to be about understanding how I can do my job better. Again, I was following my own road map, which was talked about, and people studied the 48 team and myself. They followed that roadmap.
“Through losing the championship last year, I think I can strip some layers down and figure out how to do things differently.”
A chief area of concern, Johnson said, is communication, one of the building blocks that served the team so well in past years. Not the sometimes biting remarks that fans may have heard over the scanner during a race – something that both he and Knaus said was somewhat overblown – but the translation of information necessary to field a competitive car.
“It didn’t operate at it’s best for sure and I think there are a lot of factors to that,” Johnson said of the communication breakdown, citing pressure, expectations and trying to win a sixth consecutive title as reasons.
“When we hit the race track we have high expectations for ourselves,” he said. “We expect to be top of the board in practice, top of the board in qualifying, or near it, run up front. And when that stuff’s not happening, you try harder. You put more pressure on; the things start stacking up. And I think in the process the communication slows down.
“And I’m a guy that when things get real tough, I get quiet. And when the expectations and all the things that we wanted to have happen weren’t taking place, I think the communication valve got smaller or shut down. And that’s a problem; that’s what we’ve got to be aware of.”
Knaus, the brains behind the team that dominated Sprint Cup competition from 2006-10, said while the team no longer wears the title of defending champions, there’s no reason for wholesale changes. There were, after all, victories at Talladega and Kansas last year. And for the eighth consecutive year, Johnson was among those that qualified for the Chase For The Sprint Cup.
“I think our model’s not broken,” Knaus said. “I don’t think there’s anything really wrong with the way we run our race team or what we do. So we’re not making too many changes.”
Fresh off a vacation in South Africa, Knaus said the team had much to be proud of in 2011, even if the sixth-place points finish was the worst of Johnson’s Cup career.
“I’m very proud of what we did,” Knaus said. “It was a career season in most regards to some teams. That’s not the way that we want to perform ... but we won a couple of races, we led a bunch of laps. Our team grew. Our pit crew got tenfold better than what they had been. ... There were a lot of things that came out of last year.
“No, we didn’t win the championship. Am I disappointed? Absolutely I’m disappointed. But man, it’s going to happen. Everybody said it was going to happen before it happened so we proved you wrong for quite awhile.”
Six consecutive titles wasn’t meant to be. But Knaus said the team is far from finished.
“I think that everybody realizes that we did a good job and we’ve done a good job and we’re far from done,” he said. “I know I’m getting older, but I’m not over the hill. Jimmie is still a fantastic race car driver and our team is full of a bunch of young guys. So I think we’ve got a long time to go yet.”
