Team 48 Chicagoland Speedway Preview

Lowe’s Monte Carlo driver Jimmie Johnson and Team 48 travel to Chicagoland Speedway this weekend for Sunday’s NASCAR Nextel Cup race. Johnson leads Matt Kenseth by 8 points in the season point’s race.

DRIVER JIMMIE JOHNSON QUOTES:

CHICAGOLAND: “This is a big race for us. The Chicago area is a great sports town. (Crew Chief) Chad Knaus is from Rockford, Ill. and I know it’s important to him that we do well in front of his friends there. We did some media work there a few weeks ago and everyone seems very excited about the race. I think with each year we go up there Chicago gets more and more interested in NASCAR. My worst finish in four years there is fourth, but we have never won there so it’s a place that would be pretty cool to walk out of with a trophy.”

ALTERING THE CHASE FOR THE CHAMPIONSHIP: “The Chase has done great things for our sport. There is no doubt about it. If I am in the situation to have a nice point lead going into the Chase, I think that's one part of the Chase that could be adjusted and made a little bit better. In my own mind, I also think that making it within 400 points of the leader and not really worrying about 10 cars being in it would be more fair to the teams that have had a great season for the first 26 races. I expect over time there would be some small changes and that would help. But we've got a great product right now and the last three years the Chase has been really exciting.”

POTENTIALLY MAKING THE CHASE A LARGER FIELD? “I think it makes a major impact (if you expand the field) to the way the Chase is raced -- especially if you look at last year's Chase and Jeff Gordon finishing 11th. If you look at how he came back in the Chase and won some races. It's so tough to be a champion in our sport and the season is so long to have it all re-racked in a sense, with 10 races to go and you're separated by five points per position. It's great for the fans. As a competitor, I think you have a much different opinion than maybe even the sanctioning body and trying to put on the best possible show for the fans. As a competitor, that's bad news. I don't want to hear that. I don't want to see it expand. I would love to see it be a five-car race. If you earned that right over 26 races to be in the top five percent of our sport, then so be it. We know that it's better for our sport to have a Chase situation and let them race for the championship. But expanding that may be great news for the fans but it's bad news for the competitors.”

DO YOU FEEL YOU ARE LOCKED INTO THE CHASE ALREADY? “I certainly know that it's not a done deal for the Chase. And for us to even say that this is our year to be a champion, I hope we're doing the right things, but to predict that is just way, way too far out. We still have plenty of opportunities to get in trouble and not make the Chase. Our mentality is to act like we're in the Chase, in a sense, and make sure that we're collecting as many points as we can every week, and really just points-racing. In years past, we had a nice margin and elected to try new things and to experiment and we lost something. We didn't find what we needed. And we lost some momentum. And then the pressure started to build and we thought we were dealing with it well at the time, but looking back, it couldn't have been a positive. It couldn't have been a good thing. We still are trying to develop our cars but we're just a different race team right now. We're a different race team this year than last. We have more experience knowing how to deal with pressure and working with the set-ups with the race cars. We're doing a better job right now in keeping the right momentum going and that's really what we're trying to do -- is just keep picking away at this deal race after race, top 10's, and try to keep as many points rolling as possible.”

Race Notes

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