Jimmie Johnson showcases why he’s NASCAR’s best with record-tying 7th championship

If Jimmie Johnson had a date with destiny, by all appearances it wasn’t going to happen Sunday night. Her date was going to be with Kyle Busch, Carl Edwards, or Joey Logano, all of whom were better positioned to drive away with the 2016 championship at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

A weekend that had begun with positive vibes as Johnson sought to win a record-tying seventh Sprint Cup title took a different turn about an hour before the season-ending championship final went green. NASCAR inspectors determined something was amiss on the A-post of the No. 48 Chevrolet that needed minor fixing.

The correction meant that Johnson -- in a race likely requiring he win to collect the championship hardware -- had forfeited his 14th starting position, and would fall to the rear of the 40-driver grid. Not a crippling penalty on a track that allows drivers ample opportunity to pass, but it was a penalty nonetheless and put Johnson well behind Busch, Edwards, and Logano at the onset.

Undeterred, Johnson quickly erased the deficit. He recouped 16 spots within eight laps. Seven laps later, he was 14th -- his original starting position -- and was in the top 10 shortly thereafter.

But then a new issue arose: Johnson’s car, though good, wasn’t great. Nor was it a race-winning machine. He could run near the front, but on this night that wouldn’t suffice. To beat Busch, Edwards, and Logano, he needed more oomph.

This is where crew chief Chad Knaus came into play. Johnson and Knaus have been together since 2002, Johnson’s first season at NASCAR’s top level, and their relationship in the initial years had some rocky moments.

The lowest moment came after they lost the 2005 championship to Tony Stewart, a race where the tension between driver and crew chief nearly reached a breaking point. During the offseason, team owner Rick Hendrick sat the two of them down in his office and put out milk and cookies served on a Mickey Mouse decorated plate.

Hendrick’s message was frank: If you’re going to act like children, then I will treat you accordingly and we’ll eat these cookies and dissolve the Johnson-Knaus combination. Otherwise, let’s clear the air and figure out how we can improve the communication.

The following year, Johnson and Knaus celebrated their first championship. They celebrated another the next year as well. Then another. And another. And another. Five successive titles. A NASCAR record and a streak retired driver and current NBC analyst Kyle Petty calls the “most underrated record in all of sports.”

They added a sixth in 2013, putting Johnson one short of the NASCAR record shared by Richard Petty (Kyle’s father) and Dale Earnhardt.

As Johnson blew apart the sport’s record books, he often made it look easy. But that success eclipsed the defining characteristic of the No. 48 team instilled by Knaus. Regardless of what adversity they encountered, Johnson and Knaus were unrelenting in their determination. Whenever things work against them, they respond by buckling down and finding a way to minimize the negative impact.

“The strength of this team is being able to look adversity in the eye and just deal with it,” Knaus said. “We might get wavered, we might get shaken, we might get knocked back on our heels, but then we bounce back and we start jabbing right back. That’s the way that we’ve rolled, and we’re going to continue to work that way until we’re done.”

Sunday night, that mentality was on full display. Gradually, Knaus dialed in the chassis on Johnson’s car, while the driver did his part by hanging around just close enough to the front that he still had a fighting chance if circumstances broke fortuitously.

The happenstance the No. 48 team needed came in the form of Edwards throwing an aggressive block on Logano with 10 laps remaining, which sent Edwards spinning into the inside wall and careering onto the track in the path of several drivers with no avenue to escape.

In the aftermath, the car of the title contender who had led more laps than any of the other Chasers was destroyed. And suddenly, on a restart with four regulation laps left, the man whose title hopes looked the bleakest throughout the cool South Florida night found himself lined up second.

Just like that, Johnson’s date with destiny had the possibility of being back on.

There would be hurdles to overcome, however.

First, on the ensuing restart, Logano, who had stopped for four fresh tires, jumped from eighth to third when another caution was waved for Ricky Stenhouse Jr. after he crashed off Turn 2. This provided Logano with a significant advantage, as he could cool his tires, which conceivably should’ve made it easier to pass Johnson on the overtime restart.

Now it was up to Johnson. What he required, he described later, was “the restart of his life.”

He got exactly that. The No. 48 car took off while Logano spun his tires, allowing Johnson to build an insurmountable gap to claim the race win and a record-tying seventh championship that had painfully eluded him each of the past two years.

“I got the goosebumps down backstretch,” Johnson said. “I’m like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me?’ I looked in the mirror and [Logano] is fading.”

In the moment, the latest triumph almost always feels the most rewarding. In this instance, the meaning of winning the seventh this season made the feelings unequivocally true.

For much of the regular season, the dynasty Johnson and Knaus had constructed was wobbly. The cars were slow and didn’t handle properly, and to compensate, everyone involved pushed harder, which only impelled a rash of mistakes. The situation had devolved to the point Hendrick even considered breaking up the Johnson-Knaus union.

Ultimately Hendrick elected to stay the course. And just as it did 11 years ago, that decision paid dividends.

“How is it not the sweetest?” Knaus said of the championship.

Even before title No. 7, Johnson’s legacy was already largely defined. He had secured a place on the short list of NASCAR’s all-time greats, and a very good case could be made that he deserved to be atop that list.

Now, with seven series trophies, Johnson’s accomplishments are all the grander. If Petty and Earnhardt are the defining drivers of their respective generations, only Jeff Gordon is in the same vicinity as Johnson as the best driver of this generation. Even then, Johnson’s seven championships dwarf Gordon’s four.

Gordon also never won another title after Johnson started competing in Sprint Cup, even though they were teammates and had equal equipment. Gordon could never figure out how to successfully navigate the Chase in any of its various incarnations. Johnson did, seven times over.

“It’s pretty impressive,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. said. “I don’t know if we’ll ever see anybody else win seven with the way the format is. It gets harder, and the competition is so tough and fate is such a big role player in it now. The circumstances are so challenging for him compared to Richard or my father -- those guys had challenges, as well, but the environment today is most competitive.

“[Johnson’s] a really talented guy, and the cream always rises to the top.”

On Sunday, the cream not only rose to the top, it completely bubbled over.