It seems hard to believe, but indeed there are places where five-time Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson has never won a race – five of them, actually. One of those facilities where Johnson hasn’t gone to Victory Lane is Michigan International Speedway, site of this weekend’s Quicken Loans 400.
To say that Johnson has been up-and-down recently on the two-mile oval may be putting it mildly. In last year’s pair of races at MIS, Johnson finished fifth in June despite running out of gas on the final lap but then suffered a DNF when the Cup circus came back in August. Going back to 2011, a parts failure led to a 27th-place result in the June race, but in August, he turned in a runner-up effort.
2010 saw him finish 6th (June) and 12th (August), which were improvements from his MIS runs in 2009; in June of that year, he ran out of gas and finished 22nd despite leading 146 of 200 laps, and later that August, more fuel problems sent him to a 33rd-place finish after leading 133 circuits.
Suffice to say, Johnson’s itching to finally get that Michigan win under his belt.
“I’ve been ready for a long time,” said Johnson, who won last weekend at Pocono Raceway in dominant style. “We’ve been so close here. But, when it happens, it will make it all that sweeter for us. The exciting thing is we’ve been plenty fast here over the years. But getting to the final lap and seeing that checkered flag has been a little more difficult than I could imagine.”
But even without a win at MIS, he’s still managed to come away with plenty of hardware in his career. This time, he comes to Michigan with a strong 51-point edge over Carl Edwards in the championship, something that he said he couldn’t think of having when the season began.
That lead, as he also noted, could be bigger at this time if not for problems at the Coca-Cola 600 last month and more recently at Dover International Speedway, where a restart penalty cost him a potential win.
“I look at Charlotte and Dover as misses to even have 20 or 30 more points,” he said. “I really am shocked that we are so far out ahead of everybody. And I know that the No. 20 [Matt Kenseth] has had some bad luck and a couple of other guys have, too. But we’ve had a little bad luck as well.”