Long faces, but no short hopes in No. 48 garage

LONG POND, Pa. -- Jimmie Johnson lacked what he considered to be about 150 yards of saving a probable top-10 finish in Sunday's Pocono 500.

Johnson, whose No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet ran in the top 10 at Pocono Raceway for 72 of the race's first 90 laps, was victimized when his car's left front tire exploded on Lap 90 (watch video).

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That's never good -- but Johnson's issue was compounded by where it occurred.

"The tire just exploded -- like a grenade," Johnson said. "But that didn't cause the damage. It happened right before the start / finish line.

"If it had happened 150 yards earlier, I would have been able to come to pit road -- but as it was, I had to drive around, two-and-a-half miles -- and that ground the sway bar mount off."

Johnson's trouble was compounded when no caution flew during his trip around the track, despite race viewers with high definition TV reporting copious amounts of debris spewing from Johnson's stricken car.

Johnson went to pit road first, and then back to the garage, where his crew replaced the sway bar mount in less than 10 laps.

But it was damage done for the defending Nextel Cup champion, as he fell to 42nd in the rundown, nine laps down to race-winning teammate Jeff Gordon (watch video).

It was a bitter blow for the group, as Johnson had been in the top 10 from the start until pit stops under caution at about Lap 66, when a large number of cars took two or no tires. That left Johnson 20th at the restart.

He'd made his way back into the top 10 just before the tire problem occurred.

Neither Johnson nor crew chief Chad Knaus felt they'd seen inordinate wear on their tires in their previous changes.

"We're not sure what happened," Johnson said. "We had no issues on our first run, and that tire is so destroyed we'll never know what happened to it.

"We don't know if it was punctured and we don't know if it was our fault, but the bottom line is, there really wasn't anything we could do about it."

Knaus agreed on that point.

"A couple of cars had slapped the wall and there probably was some debris out there," the crew chief said. "But there's really no telling what caused it. Unfortunately the rubber is the softest thing on that racecar, and if we ran something over, there's nothing you can do about it."

Gordon was in the top spot after 106 laps, when the race was called because of rain; which brought out the race's fourth and final caution, at Lap 105.

Despite the misfortune, Johnson fell only from second to fourth in the driver standings, albeit 305 points behind Gordon.

He was more concerned about the drop than Knaus, who spent some long moments after the race was called, sitting on his trailer's side stairway, slowly dragging on a cigarette.

"I'm always thinking about the points," Johnson said earlier, right after the rain delay began. "Sitting here today, it doesn't seem so bad, but if you string a couple of bad races together, it can get you into trouble."

Knaus was more nonplussed by the drop.

"It's not bad at all," he said. "When we get to the cutoff, it will be a moot point, and with the way the system is now, we'll have a 40-point edge over the people who haven't won."

Both Gordon and Johnson have won four times -- which gives them a 40-point bonus when the standings are reset after race 26 in September. No one else has more than one victory at this point in the season.