Q. Jimmie, I was curious, it seemed like Sam got a lot of the blame both on TV and in your comments. Then maybe looking later, it seemed like Reutimann was more part of that. Have you evaluated that at all? Do you want to clarify?
JIMMIE JOHNSON: Yeah, I had one quick look at it after the race last weekend. I haven’t studied much of it. I had a phone call from David, talked a little bit. I guess it was easy for me to blame the 77 because he was the guy that came up inside and got into me. I think he was the one kind of holding up the line. It’s just easy to blame him.
But it did take two cars. And I think Sam had some handling issues, wasn’t going all that well. As he got into the turn, checked up more than the 00 thought. The 00 made contact and off it went. So there were a lot of ingredients to what went on.
I try not to blame too much. Once I got back to the media center, four hours of sitting there watching the points disappear, I probably put a little more blame on Sam than necessary. You know, I just wish we could have made it through those few laps and Sam, you know, could have hung onto it. Not placing more blame on him than need be. But he almost had that thing saved, then it wiggled, came back up into me.
I guess now there’s not a lot of good complaining about it. It’s behind us. Can’t wait to get on the track so we can talk about something else.
Q. Looking ahead to Miami, you’ve done this obviously three times now. When you get to Miami, what’s the process? Is there a checklist? Kind of talk about how you’re going to approach that weekend. I know you’re going to say it’s not different from any other, but come on, it’s a little different. What’s the stress level like, that stuff?
JIMMIE JOHNSON: Yeah, so much depends on this weekend and how things go. You know, if things go really well for us, it takes a little bit of pressure off, helps the week go by a little faster. The other side, you know, easy to figure out. If it doesn’t go well, you just can’t wait to get in the car and get things going.
The more we can keep it the same, the better it is. There is a lot of media leading up to the race, of course, a lot of questions that come about, that I don’t really think of things in those terms. I find leaving the media briefing, media stuff we do on Wednesday, Thursday, there’s a lot of thoughts swirling in the brain that were never there because I really try to keep it simple, keep things the same.
Hopefully I can leave the media get-together and shake all that stuff out, focus on the race and treat it, you know, like I would a typical race. That’s really the goal. Don’t end up there all the time. It’s not as easy to pull off as it sounds. But that’s my goal and I would assume everybody else’s goal, to try to keep it the same and try to keep the stress down.
Q. Jimmie, if you didn’t feel like you did anything wrong, why were you beating yourself up all week? How hard is it to get that out of your brain? How important is it that you’re able to do that? Have you ever struggled with thinking and thinking and thinking and not being able to get it out?
JIMMIE JOHNSON: No, I really do a lot of thinking about what I did wrong. I look back on that, I’m not sure I did anything wrong because we were all on the bottom and someone had the inside lane held up. The corner before, I was hit from behind going into the turn. I thought, man, going into one and two, they’re going to check up again, I should be on the outside, avoid being spun out from behind.
I don’t feel like I could have done anything differently. But it doesn’t help that, you know, the feelings of losing 111 points. Those are still there. I don’t know where to equate it. I don’t know how to fix it. But that negative feeling’s there. That emptiness is there. Man, I just lost 111 points. That part is there. I’ve thought about it enough. I know I couldn’t have done anything differently. So I’m just like, Get me in the car again. I just need to get in the racecar here for practice and start focusing on today, the handling issues of what we experience here, and it will help me get through it.
Q. Even after losing 111 points, do you take some comfort that these two tracks are left for you, you still have the 73-point lead? Is there some comfort factor there?
JIMMIE JOHNSON: Definitely. I feel that a 73-point lead is a very, very healthy lead. With today’s racing, the competition, the year that Mark Martin and Jeff have had in the Chase, I feel very good about our points lead. But it’s hard to look back at the week before at 184, the comfort that that brought. You know, it’s like, Wow, we could have left here with a 184-point lead. Different story. Homestead would have been a very enjoyable experience.
That possibility still exists. I mean, the 5 could have trouble this week. You never know. This is racing. Anything and everything will happen.
Q. Jimmie, you mentioned earlier you had guys on the 5 and 24 working on your car. You got three drivers from the same team battling for the championship. How do you guys at Hendrick keep it on an even keel and not have toxic relationships from team to team when you’re all battling for the same thing and you’re all fiercely competitive?
JIMMIE JOHNSON: I really think that from my experience I look at how Jeff handled things from the beginning. Mark’s been doing this a long time, operating from an area of respect that it didn’t need much work on it to fit into the group. I mean, it just didn’t. But with the way Jeff handled things from the start, taught me how to respect my teammates, how to work with my teammates. That all comes from Rick, as well.
So from the highest one in command all the way down through Jeff, who is a boss in a sense for me, I believe in the system and I know what we have done before the Chase as a team got us where we are, and we need to keep doing that stuff.
The other thing is experience. There are weeks where we’ve had the fastest car in the Chase and our teammate that we’re racing with for the championship can take our setup and make their car better and put up, you know, a good finish. And we’ve been doing this long enough to where we have needed the help. So through time, it just kind of balances out. We found a way to do it.
I don’t think it’s easy. It’s challenging for all of us. I don’t think that if you put Roush in the situation or Childress, some of the other teams, I’m not sure how they’d handle it. I think that we do a really good job of dealing with all of the issues that come from it and respect one another. I think bottom line is respect. We respect each other enough to have this thing work.
Q. I don’t know what it is that you’re feeling, what emotion it is, if it’s pressure or desire or excitement or whatever that emotion is. What is the difference in the emotion of trying to win your first championship compared to trying not to lose your first championship in four years?
JIMMIE JOHNSON: So hard to think back to 2006. But all those emotions exist, and I think my mind goes through different scenarios where, okay, don’t want to lose it, so you feel the pressure of that. Also, Why am I thinking about these emotions? I need to think of being aggressive and playing offense. So I think of it in a way where it brings excitement.
What I find is I go through two or three emotions and it just keeps looping back around, just the brain doing its thing. From the past three years of being in the situation, I understand the peaks and valleys of the emotional rollercoaster I’m on. I try to find a middle ground to relax and be comfortable with, look at the tracks, how you’re team has been performing, build confidence in a lot of the tangible things instead of the emotions that fluctuate from day to day, hour to hour. I mean, we all go through it. It’s a rollercoaster ride, to say the least. I do feel like I’m chasing my tail day to day, yup.
Q. You are so good here. But because of what happened last week, are you feeling vulnerable at all? Are there guys out there that you get around, although I’d like you to name names, you probably won’t, that you want to get away from them and just be out of the line of fire?
JIMMIE JOHNSON: Yeah, I mean, there’s definitely a handful of guys that you’re concerned about. But in the end, when you’re on a short track like this, you’d lap through people and you’re in traffic so often, the double-file restarts, it’s not so much a car number or a person, it’s kind of the situation.
Page 10
I don’t think, you know, anybody’s really safe, especially how you can run side-by-side here in one and two, one line is preferred, three and four another is preferred. It’s going to be tough to get single-file.
So I do have concern and worry about contact or something out of my control taking place again. I mean, I think we all fear that. But I find some confidence knowing that everybody’s going to deal with that. I don’t think lightning can strike two weeks in a row. I’m certainly hoping it doesn’t.
| 
|