NASCAR
Jimmie Johnson’s Hendrick 48 Team Could Have Achieved Greater Heights, Only to Nearly be Torn Apart
This past weekend, Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus were both enshrined into the NASCAR Hall of Fame. The two towering pillars of the Hendrick 48 dynasty fittingly went in together, as inseparable as they were for nearly two decades. Seven championships including five in a row, over 80 wins, and their level of weekly dominance may never be seen again in NASCAR. However, they could have surpassed their own accomplishments.
“It could have been seven in a row,” Johnson said about their unmatched run of consecutive titles. The Hendrick 48 crew were deep contenders in both the 2004 and 2005 championships. These moments are often overshadowed by the team’s lights-out run for the next five seasons. Despite this excellence, the 21st century’s winningest driver was within eyesight of an unthinkable nine rings.
“In 2004 we lose the championship to Kurt Busch by basically two spots on track depending on the old point system,” Johnson said. “How that played out, 2005 we’re in the championship running again racing Tony Stewart. We have an issue with the right rear tire and crash (at Homestead). Stewart also had a pretty poor night for his standards. That left us in this head space of like ‘we had a shot at it.’ So in our eyes we had two opportunities slip away. You just never know how many looks you’re going to get at a championship. So that that frustration of being so close was really the foundation of the anger.”
2004 was the inaugural season of the NASCAR Playoffs. Johnson and Busch were two of the five drivers mathematically alive for that year’s title in the finale. Even with a wheel falling off of Busch’s No. 97 Ford, the Hendrick 48 left Homestead yearning for the Cup. This angst followed a dominant eight-win season for Johnson and Knaus.
Moving ahead a calendar year, the Hendrick 48 bunch was in a very similar situation. Four wins across 2005 was still not enough, losing out to Stewart in his second championship. Little did anyone know at the time, but things were not as healthy as they seemed within the walls of the 48 team.
“Maybe the week after Homestead, we were just angry and mad. Both of us had spoken to Rick (Hendrick, team owner) and evidently acted like a baby or a kid. It led Rick to the idea for a meeting and he called us out.”
This infamous meeting with NASCAR’s winningest car owner proved to be an inflection point for the Hendrick 48 team’s pathway.
“Rick truly demanded us to eat cookies and to drink the milk. We broke the cookie he’s like ‘no eat the cookie.’ We took a bite he’s like ‘no take a bigger bite now, drink the milk.’ So Rick keeps pushing us to get into the experience and then gives us both a chance to kind of air what’s on our minds.”
At the Hall of Fame ceremony, Hendrick gladly retold the tale of the meeting that altered modern NASCAR history.
“(Jimmie and Chad) were kind of feuding, and they weren’t sure if they wanted to stay together,” Hendrick said. “We were trying to decide if we were going to separate them and it was really a shame. The success was there and I didn’t think that that was a good plan.”
“I said ‘You know we can separate you, but you don’t know what’s going to happen.’ So I called them up to my office, and I had a gallon of milk and I had Mickey Mouse plates with cookies. I said ‘guys you know it’s really a shame that you two are so successful we can’t get along. But if you want to act like children then why don’t we have some milk and cookies and we’ll sit in the floor and have time out.’ Then they started laughing.”
“It was amazing to watch everything shift,” Johnson said. “Because when we walked into the meeting, we didn’t make eye contact, (Chad) and I didn’t say hello to one another. It just fed Rick’s point that if you’re going to act like kids I’m going to treat you like kids.”
“Just for the record it wasn’t a gentle set down of the gallon of milk,” Knaus said. “It was like we’re going to eat some milk and cookies. Then we didn’t eat them and he’s like ‘no, you’re eating the cookies!’ so we had to.”
Even with Knaus suspended for the opening four races of 2006, the Hendrick 48 team found new life. Johnson and substitute crew chief Darian Grubb won the Daytona 500, race three at Las Vegas, and earned two top-10s in between. The Hendrick 48 was nearly unbeatable from that point forward for the remainder of the decade. The next five years saw 35 victories and their perfect run of five-straight titles.
“We honestly got into a real conversation in many ways after that meeting,” Johnson said. “No joke we left that meeting and changed our course in how we worked. We went in a different direction and then ’06 takes place, we come out of the gate strong, win the Daytona 500, win our first championship, win the next championship, on and on and on. I think there was a lot of weight in that meeting that we had.”
“It was a really tough time for me,” Knaus said. “We had seen such a steep trajectory and really thought that we should have won the championship by then. I mean we had a very good opportunity to win the championship in 2002, our very first year. When I sat in that meeting, I’ll be frank and tell you I walked out of that meeting and remember vividly I was embarrassed.
“I was embarrassed to the fact that Mr. Hendrick had to set us down, two grown men with the opportunity of a lifetime. We were sitting there just letting it go away. At that point I was like ‘I’m not doing this anymore. I’m going to take the advice of a man who has mentored us and gave us an opportunity and change the structure of the 48 team.”
“We worked diligently that whole offseason of the 2005-2006 year. We worked on giving the engineers more skin in the game. We worked on putting more emphasis on the engineers, on Car Chief Ron Malec, giving everybody a little bit more tangible interest in the team.”
“I vowed that I was going to do it differently from then onward. Trust me I made a lot of mistakes after that. But that did set the foundation of where we were going to be in the future.”
“He had the shortest fuse,” Johnson said. “He was so overworked, he was covering so much territory and then we got comfortable delegating to different folks, empowering more people. I think that gave him a much wider bandwidth to really run and operate the team on a different level. Then the championships just started coming.”
Following back-to-back championship shortcomings, the Hendrick 48 team was on the precipice of being torn apart. If not for an unconventional method from the Hall of Fame car owner, there’s a chance this dynasty in the making would be broken up before they climbed the mountaintop. Mickey Mouse, milk and cookies, and an old school tough love conversation helped shape the course of modern NASCAR.
Written by Peter Stratta
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Photo Credit to Peter Stratta/TSJSports
