Jimmie Johnson and crew chief Chad Knaus are masters of psyching out the other players!

It’s got everybody guessing what they’re up to, as they now have an up-hill battle in the NASCAR Chase for the Championship to try and score their 6th consecutive title!

And NASCAR is forced to take the fake-out seriously, or at least give it some extra traction.

The sanction will keep a close eye on Jimmie Johnson’s cars for the remainder of the season, following report Chad Knaus asked his driver to damage his car intentionally after finishing last weekend’s race at Talladega.

Earlier this week American website SBnation.com published a  conversation between Knaus and Johnson moments before the start, where Johnson was instructed to “crack” the rear of his car if he won the race.

The audio was obtained by a fan from the live feed of Johnson’s in-car camera, which was available to users of an application on nascar.com last Sunday.

“If we win this race, you have to crack the back of the car, got it?” Knaus can be heard telling Jimmie on the recording. “Really?” replies Johnson. “Yes,” Knaus responds. “Got it? You don’t have to have to hit it hard, you don’t have to destroy it. But you’ve got to do a donut and you’ve got to hit the back end,
or somebody’s got to hit you in the [rear]-end or something. Okay?”

Knaus explained to the website that his instruction to Johnson was a precaution; a battered rear-end would likely go through post-race inspection without issues, having an explanation for not meeting tolerances if that was the case.

But come on! If Chad and Jimmie were hiding illegalities on the # 48 that a crunched read end would hide, would they be dumb enough to talk about it on the radio where everyone else can hear it?

On Friday at Martinsville, Johnson said his crew chief’s words before the start at Talladega were ‘foolish’ but he underlined that his car went clear through inspection a number of times during the weekend prior to the race.

“At the end of the day, while Chad was trying to protect himself post-race, he made a foolish statement,” said Johnson. “That is truly it. At the end of the day, that car passed inspection multiple times at an impound race and was pushed out onto the grid. It was certainly something that we did not want to take
place.

Right…..

This smells of a psych-job to me.

What do YOU think?

ET

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 29th, 2011 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.