LAS VEGAS -- The last place Chad Knaus wanted to be was on stage, in front of a microphone. Hours earlier his No. 48 car had finished two laps down and in 29th place at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, a startlingly poor performance that led some to wonder whether Jimmie Johnson's time atop the Sprint Cup tour was coming to an end. They wanted to fly home and figure out what went wrong. Instead they loaded the vehicle into the transporter, changed clothes, and walked into a tent outside Turn 3 -- where 3,000 representatives of their primary sponsor were waiting for them.

“

How often have you seen us get lapped on the race track without something being wrong? We got lapped twice on the race track running full speed.

”

CHAD KNAUS

Johnson, Knaus and company have enjoyed plenty of glory days together during their years in NASCAR's premier series, winning 40 races, three championships and more than $75 million to date. But if they had to choose a single low point, it would probably be last year's event in the desert, where they turned in what car owner Rick Hendrick has termed the worst race in the history of the 48 program, and followed that with a pride-swallowing sponsor event involving thousands of managers and supervisors from Lowe's.

"I walked up on that stage and unfortunately I was the first one introduced. I had to go up there and do a two- or three-minute spiel," Knaus remembered. "I walked up there ... and was greeted with cheers and yells and screams. It felt really nice to walk up there and have that kind of reception after the kind of problems we had had that day. The first thing I said when I walked up there was, 'I hope you guys aren't [ticked] off at me.' They just all screamed, no, no. They still loved us. I knew at that point that we had to turn our season around. Not only for us, but for them too."

On the road to a third consecutive championship -- which at that point had been done by only one man, Cale Yarborough -- there was no more defining moment than Las Vegas, where the No. 48 team stared straight into the depths of mediocrity and somehow turned the experience into a momentum-builder. But first they had to explain themselves before the people who funded their race team, all those blue-shirted store managers who had expected to see something like the three consecutive victories Johnson had recorded at the 1.5-mile race track entering that weekend. Instead, they witnessed a crisis.

"We had to walk up in front of all those people and apologize for the worst race the 48 car ever had in its history," Hendrick said. "I think it sparked a lot of fire. I give these guys a lot of credit." (Continued)