Jimmie Johnson says he and 48 team victims of own success

Going on nearly an entire season without a win, Jimmie Johnson ponders whether the standards he and his team set while winning seven championships and tons of races are now part of the problem.

Being back at Dover International Speedway should be the balm that cures what ails Jimmie Johnson. The seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion has won an eye-popping 11 times at the Monster Mile, more than any other active driver at any track. His most recent victory at Dover was just last year, when he outdueled Kyle Larson in overtime, and he’s won three of the last four spring races in Delaware.

But the operative word is “should,” because Johnson and the No. 48 Chevrolet team just haven’t looked like themselves. If Dover hadn’t been moved up a month compared to last year, Johnson would be completing an entire season’s worth of races without a win, an unthinkable state of affairs for someone who has made winning routine. He wasn’t particularly fast in qualifying for the AAA 400 Drive for Autism either, failing to make the final round.

If he can’t even get right at the Monster Mile, something is definitely amiss with Johnson. Or maybe, as he told ESPN, things just don’t run your way forever, no matter how good you and your teammates are.

"I think we have created an environment of very high expectations because of the success we’ve had and I think people forget how special our run has been and we certainly want to get back into those ways and have it happen again. But history shows it doesn’t happen very often. And we’re very fortunate to harness lightning for a long stretch of time.The encouraging news is we are making our cars better each and every week. I’m more of a realist in where we’re at and what we’re doing, and reflect back and think damn, we had it really good for a while and it was really special. But we’re a victim of our own success, and I hope to create the headlines that we want and the headlines being along the lines of well, they should have won. It was Dover."

It’s an interesting and very clear-headed perspective, but also not one you’d hear from many top level athletes. Johnson admits that the run he and the 48 bunch had was not normal, and that even though they were excellent, their achievements went above and beyond what anyone could reasonably imagine.

Now the question is whether Johnson is right about the second part. The fact that all Chevrolet teams are off their game a bit — Austin Dillon’s Daytona 500 victory remains the only one for the manufacturer in 2018 — actually makes the 48 team’s struggles a little more forgivable. No Chevy teams have quite figured out the new Camaro yet, and surely that won’t keep up all season.

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Still, everything circles back to expectations. Fans will expect that Johnson and Chad Knaus will be the first to solve the Camaro riddle. Fans will expect that Johnson will shake off his slump and win or at least challenge for a win at Dover.

If neither of those things turn out to be true, it will be interesting to see if Johnson changes his tune. Until then, there’s not much he and his crew can do except grind away.