Two respectable finishes in two consecutive short-track races — Jimmie Johnson must have his mojo back.
Well, if mojo is a matter of getting a few breaks and making the most of them, the seven-time Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series champion is right there.
But if it’s a matter of being an honest-to-goodness contender to win — ah, not so much. Maybe next week, or the week after.
In Saturday night’s Toyota Owners 400 at the ¾-mile Richmond Raceway, things started poorly for Johnson, but he didn’t give up. With the help of crew chief Chad Knaus, Johnson chased the changing track conditions as the spring air cooled.
By about midway through the race, Johnson began to establish a decent pace. He was running a lap down, but he was catching and passing cars that were on the lead lap. He was still losing time to the leaders, but not at such an overwhelming rate.
Then he got just what he needed — a series of cautions.
One of the flags allowed him to take advantage of NASCAR’s “wave-around” rule. Drivers who are a lap behind but decline to pit under caution are allowed to drive around to the back of the pack — so they’re on the lead lap, but running on worn tires. They’ll need another caution soon to avoid being overrun by the leaders in short order.
And that’s just what happened. Just eight green-flag laps later, another caution flew. Johnson and the other wave-around beneficiaries were able to take on that needed fresh set of tires. That put Johnson behind a batch of front-running cars, but with a chance to run close to the leaders’ pace.
Johnson didn’t waste his good fortune. He shouldered his way past a few cars that had been too fast for him earlier and came home sixth.
That finish backed up his third-place result at Bristol Motor Speedway on Monday and must be reason for optimism in Johnson’s camp.
But let’s be realistic here. For Johnson to be considered all the way out of the longest slump of his career — 32 races without a win — there’s work to be done.
These past two finishes are the first time this season he has come home better than ninth, but in neither race have the leaders needed to worry that he was going to make a charge to the front.
In neither race did Johnson lead a single lap. He hasn’t led a lap in this season’s nine races.
At Richmond, he qualified 17th in a field of 38 cars, and for a while, it looked like he might finish worse than he started.
For the first 100 laps, his Chevrolet could hardly get out of its own way. He scraped the wall at one point. The leaders lapped him and sailed away.
If you were watching and listening to the TV broadcast of the race, you might have wondered if Johnson was in it at all. He was that irrelevant.
The second hundred laps, he was slightly better. He didn’t get lapped, but the leader would have passed him again if there had been just a few more laps in Stage 2.
Then things changed. In the second half of the race, things began to turn Johnson’s way. If you focused on his car, it was clear he was no longer a lost sheep, no longer the motorsports equivalent of a “Where’s Waldo?” game.
In the closing laps, the broadcast crew that had hardly mentioned him all night had one of those eyebrows-raised moments.
“I can’t believe we’re even talking about Jimmie Johnson,” Darrell Waltrip said.
And when fellow commentator Mike Joy allowed that winner Kyle Busch was the one driver who would leave Richmond happy, Waltrip piped up again.
“I think Jimmie Johnson has got to leave here ecstatic.”
Maybe not. For a driver used to running up front, there’s probably a ways to go for that kind of joy.
He’s been stuck for a long time on 83 career wins. One more and he’ll tie Waltrip and Bobby Allison for fourth place on NASCAR’s all-time list.
When he pulls even with those two, then we’ll see an ecstatic driver.