It’s taken most of the season, but Jimmie Johnson has found his groove in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series.
A week after he won the pole position and the Allstate 400 at Indianapolis, Johnson drove his No. 48 Chevrolet to the top-starting spot for the Sunoco American Red Cross Pennsylvania 500 at the Pocono Raceway.
Johnson had one victory in the first 19 races, and that came on a fuel-mileage gamble last April at Phoenix. Now he’s practically unstoppable.
Johnson won his second pole in a row and third of the NASCAR Spring Cup stock car racing season today at Pocono Raceway. He knocked Mark Martin off the top spot in qualifying for Sunday’s Sunoco Red Cross Pennsylvania 500.
Martin warned that Johnson, the two-time defending champion of the series, is back top form.
Martin turned a lap of 167.560 mph that looked like it probably would hold up for his first pole since 2001. But Johnson moved him to the outside of the front row for Sunday’s race with a sizzling 168.215.
“It was a very smooth and comfortable lap,” said Johnson, who has 16 career poles.
“It really is confusing how you use the left-front, the right-front and both - the compounds of the material inside,” Johnson said. “I think what we learned here at Pocono in the spring carried over to Michigan, and we were able to show it at Michigan, also at Indy. Coming back (to Pocono), we’re in good shape.”
Johnson, a two-time defending series champion, has improved two spots to fourth in the rankings since the last Pocono race.
Three months ago, Johnson’s team struggled so much they spent more than a week testing on off days. The first step, the driver said, was admitting there was a problem.
“At first we thought, ‘Well, it’s just a bad test.’ And then we’d go back out for the race and thought, ‘Oh, bad race, but we can’t be that far off.’ We worked extremely hard over the offseason, but unfortunately we worked in the wrong areas,” Johnson said.
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