Jimmie Johnson gets his 10th Dover win
Jimmie Johnson now has 10 wins at Dover and the latest came with a familiar strategy.
Much like he did at Kansas earlier in May, Johnson opted for track position instead of tires during a late-race caution. He subsequently took the lead and held on through two more restarts for the win.
Until he took the lead on lap 384, Johnson wasn’t having a bad day unless you judge him by his Dover standards. After staying out when Kyle Busch and Brian Scott crashed, he restarted second next to Kevin Harvick. He took the lead from Harvick immediately after the restart and no one really came close to catching Johnson the rest of the way.
“Gosh, just driving hard, working that trackbar adjuster as much as I could,” Johnson said of how he got the win by staying out. “Trying to be smart with my line and I guess guys with two tires weren’t all that fast. Chad said something to me about that on the radio and they never really came. [Harvick] and I did just fine on our old tires and held those guys off.”
Harvick had the best chance on a green-white-checkered restart after a crash involving Casey Mears and AJ Allmendinger. He stormed to the outside but wasn’t able to get alongside Johnson exiting turn two on the penultimate lap. Johnson cleared him and cruised the rest of the way.
“Restarts were bad,” Harvick, who was leading before the caution came out for Busch and Scott, said. “We just struggled with really, really tight on restarts. We didn’t need to see the caution.”
The win makes Johnson just the fifth driver to have 10 or more wins at a track. The other four are Richard Petty (Daytona, Martinsville, North Wilkesboro, Richmond, Rockingham), Darrell Waltrip (Bristol, North Wilkesboro, Martinsville), Dale Earnhardt (Talladega) and David Pearson (Darlington). Johnson’s first career win at Dover came in 2002 and
Martin Truex Jr. once again had one of the race’s fastest cars but late-race strategy didn’t play into his hands. While Johnson and Harvick stayed out during the caution for the Busch-Scott crash, Truex took two tires and restarted in the second row. He never challenged for the lead (thanks to a well-timed block by Kasey Kahne on the last restart) and finished sixth.
Pole-sitter Denny Hamlin was also fast, but he was involved in the next-to-last caution flag. He spun off the bumper of Clint Bowyer on the backstretch and clipped Kurt Busch before slamming head-on into a, you guessed it, outside backstretch wall that wasn’t covered in SAFER barrier. Thankfully the impact wasn’t incredibly severe and Hamlin drove his car to pit road.
Johnson now leads the series with four wins in 2015. Harvick, with two, is the only other driver to have multiple victories.
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
