Q&A: Jimmie Johnson, Chad Knaus and Rick Hendrick.

Monday, 20th November 2006

After completing his comeback from the bottom of the Chase for the Championship standings ten weeks ago by taking his first Nextel Cup title, Jimmie Johnson joined crew chief Chad Knaus and team owner Rick Hendrick in a jubilant press conference at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

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CK:
That's because I could not even blink when there's a TV camera in my face. It was bad. You know, I didn't think it was that bad, it was painful but I tried to keep my composure. Obviously I didn't do a very good job.

The thing was, we were in a position that we wanted the race to be over with because we were solidly in the Top?10 and that was the big thing I wanted to do. I didn't want to back into this championship at all, and I wanted to go out there and race for it. And that's what this team does best is it races week?in and week?out and for us to be able to go out there and run solidly in the Top?10 all day long disregarding minor mishaps that we had, that's how I wanted the race to end and I didn't want us to get into a situation with a bunch of laps down track or something like that to where Jimmie was going to have to back out of it and fall back to 15th or 20th and kind of ride. I wanted to make sure that we ran it to the end. That was my frustration more than anything, because at that point we had identified with the fact that basically all we had to do was be last car on the lead lap and Matt not finish any better than third and we would have been able to win the championship, I think is what it was. So I just wanted to get it done.

JJ:
He never told me that 'you can lose a couple spots here in the restart but don't worry too much'. When it was over, I didn't know that we had won. I had a feeling that we won but I was real nervous.

Q:
Your dad talked here a little bit not too long ago, he saw you yesterday and said he was doing well until he saw you and then he got nervous and he said he thought you were nervous with looking at the lap track. What was it like the last 24 hours like yesterday, today, just the feelings, the nerves and how did you combat it?

JJ:
I don't really know how I dealt with it. At times I didn't think I was doing too good of a job. You get so caught up in worrying about things you can't control and I'm sitting here telling myself, don't worry about those things, just focus on your job, focus on what you need to do in the race car.