Don't Hand Title to Joe Gibbs Racing Just Yet
Reid Spencer - SportingNews.com
May 18, 2010
It would be so easy to climb aboard the Joe Gibbs Racing bandwagon-and so tempting.
The statistics are seductive. Denny Hamlin has won three Sprint Cup races since NASCAR discarded the rear wing in favor of a spoiler on the back of its Cup racecar.
Hamlin won the first spoiler race March 29 at Martinsville two days before ACL surgery on his left knee. After the operation, he won twice more, at Texas and Darlington, to tie four-time defending Cup champion Jimmie Johnson for most wins in the series. Johnson, who dominated the 93-race "wing era," notched all three of his victories before the change to the spoiler.
Kyle Busch put bookends on Hamlin's Darlington win with victories May 1 at Richmond and Sunday at Dover. Together Hamlin and Busch have won five of the seven spoiler races. Johnson and his vaunted teammates at Hendrick Motorsports have won none.
If the statistics are seductive, so are the fundamentals behind them. The post-op Hamlin has arrived at the track with a confidence and dedication that suggest he might live up to his preseason billing as Johnson's most likely successor.
Hamlin's knee may be 75 percent at this point, as he says, but he already has proved that a Hamlin with a 75 percent knee and 100 percent focus is a more formidable threat than a Hamlin with a 100 percent knee and 75 percent focus. The bottom line is that Hamlin is unlikely to repeat the kind of mistake he made last year in the fourth Chase race at California, where he wrecked himself on a restart and effectively bowed out of the championship battle.
All the early-season talk about a "new" Kyle Busch may be just that-talk. It's undeniable, however, that the driver of the No. 18 Toyota has made a quantum leap in his decision making on the racetrack. No longer an all-or-nothing driver, Busch has climbed to second in points by making prudent choices-and by pushing the envelope when it's warranted.
Hamlin is 29, Busch 25. The third member of the JGR troika, Joey Logano, won't turn 20 until May 24, and Logano's upside is enormous. With each race, he learns, and it shows immediately in subsequent races. Currently 18th in the standings with 14 races left before the cutoff at Richmond, Logano is by no means out of the Chase equation.
Understandably, the JGR bandwagon is gathering steam, and there are already those who point to the passing of the torch from Johnson to either Hamlin or Busch. Team owner Joe Gibbs knows the talk is premature. The coach of three Super Bowl winners with the Washington Redskins, Gibbs knows how critical the fourth quarter is, and relative to the Cup season, we're not even at halftime.
Johnson and Busch had the two best cars Sunday. Johnson made an uncharacteristic mistake-speeding on pit road-and paid dearly for it, with the No. 48 Chevrolet dropping to 16th at the finish thanks to the consequent pass-through penalty.
After the race, Gibbs added a cautionary note.
"You can kind of get on a run in pro sports, but the thing that I'm always conscious of--the knuckle sandwich is waiting right around the corner in pro sports," Gibbs said. "We're just getting started really here (at JGR). I'm thrilled that the last seven, eight weeks have gone so well for us, but the reality is that can all turn in a week.
"That's one of the things, I guess, about pro sports-the two that I've been in, and particularly this sport-we've got great teams out there we've talked about, the 48, and to say that we're there would be ridiculous. They pretty much dominated things. They had a great car again today."
Chances are, the No. 48 team will have better cars in the Chase, when crew chief Chad Knaus rolls out the special-and sometimes barely legal--equipment that has carried Johnson to four straight titles.
Remember 2008, when Busch won eight of the first 22 races and imploded in the first three Chase events. Clearly, Busch has learned from that experience.
And Hamlin has learned from his own adversity. The knee surgery that could have been a convenient excuse is instead a challenge that has elevated his performance.
Whether either driver is likely to unseat Johnson, however, is a question for November, not May.
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