BRISTOL, Tenn. — There’s an aura about Bristol Motor Speedway, a track that drivers and fans equally love for its electric, throwback-style racing.
Jimmie Johnson never chalked it up as one of his favorites. The four-time defending NASCAR champion could never get a handle on the 0.533-mile bullring, where he struggled far more than he ever succeeded.
Until Sunday, that is.
Johnson finally knocked Bristol off his to-do list, plowing from sixth to first in just three laps Sunday in the Food City 500 to grab his first career victory.
“Everything around Bristol is what people focus on. There are parties for it,” Johnson said. “The fans get excited for it. You walk into this facility and look around, and you want to run well.
“It’s really been a downer for me to walk through the gates, look around, ‘Man, I’m going to (stink) today.’ I really had that mind-set coming here.”
That changed last season when Johnson led laps in both Bristol races, grabbing two top-10 finishes while giving himself a guide on how to get around the concrete track.
“I started building my confidence,” he said. “Those two races gave us clear direction where to work, me a clear direction on how to drive the car.”
And that’s all he needed with 10 laps to go and an opportunity to deny Kurt Busch a chance to gain any ground on Johnson’s championship No. 48 team.
Busch led 278 of the 500 laps and had a decent gap on Johnson when his easy drive to victory was clouded by a debris caution with 17 laps remaining. All the leaders headed to pit road, and Busch and Johnson both took four tires on the final stop.
Greg Biffle, Matt Kenseth, Carl Edwards and Tony Stewart all took two tires, giving them the first four positions on the restart. Busch was fifth, Johnson was sixth and the race resumed with 10 laps to go.
Kenseth’s difficulty getting up to speed stacked up traffic behind him, including Busch, who lost his opportunity to leapfrog his way to the front.
Not Johnson, though. He weaved through the mess up to second, Stewart moved into the lead, and Johnson needed a little more than one lap to pick him off too.
“When we’re winning at tracks that we’re not supposed to, boys better look out,” Johnson warned.
Flat tire hurts cause
A flat tire relegated Denver-based Furniture Row’s Regan Smith to a 36th-place finish Sunday.
While running in the mid- to high 20s, a deflating right-front tire caused Smith to suddenly veer to the right and smack the concrete retaining wall on lap 323 of 500. Smith was not injured, but his car suffered major damage.
“It’s unfortunate about the tire going down, because we were biding our time and felt we were in position to gain a number of spots,” said Smith, who dropped two spots to 28th in the points race. “I felt all along that if we could avoid trouble we had a top-15 car.”
