Q&A: Johnson, Grubb, Hendrick

Tuesday, 21st February 2006

After winning NASCAR’s biggest race. Jimmie Johnson, his team boss Rick Hendrick and stand-in crew-chief Darian Grubb sat down to talk about their greatest triumph together to date.

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We keep talking about someone's curious if we feel there's a black mark next to this win. I think it's the complete opposite. There's a black mark next to qualifying. But the race, with the circumstances we've been through, and the situation that we're in, we overcame everybody against us. I mean, every single media person, every single crewmember. We deservedly had it. We were wrong in qualifying. We came back through all of that and won the Daytona 500. That's something I am so proud of. We looked as bad as we could ever look, and we stepped up and got the job done.

Q.
Ryan Newman brought up that he felt there was some conflict in three of your last three wins or three of your last four involving rules. Any concern over just your image being associated with rules violations?

JIMMIE JOHNSON:
No. I kind of view it as jealousy, and he doesn't have a crew chief in there working hard enough to make his cars as good. If you look at what took place last year, we had an appeal overturned, which has never been done in the sport. We were complimented for the shocks that we built and designed at Dover. So it just depends on how you look at it.

This team has worked way too hard to even have those kind of comments thrown at them, and I'm going to be very defensive over it. This team works way too hard, all the teams do in the garage area. I'm disappointed that Ryan has to come in here and make some different statements and try to tarnish what we accomplished today. I'm very proud of this team, and we've worked very hard for what we've got.

Q.
Jimmie, you kind of answered my question. You mentioned twice guys hate on your team. Why are people so jealous of you?

JIMMIE JOHNSON:
I wouldn't call it jealousy in all situations. You know, some of it's deserving. Some of it there's been some mistakes I've made. Chad has made mistakes. You know, there's consequences that come with that.