JOLIET, Ill. -- Jimmie Johnson's No. 48 crew is famous for making masterful recoveries. They've blown tires, served pit road penalties and hit walls only to rally back and post top-five finishes or better.

Saturday night at Chicagoland Speedway, not even Johnson could recover from the string of mishaps and mistakes on the mile-and-a-half track. The missteps relegated the team to a 25th-place finish after Johnson lead a large chunk of the first half of the race.

“

It wasn't a big deal until I got turned around on the backstretch.

”

-- JIMMIE JOHNSON

"Yeah, and that makes it all the worse," Johnson said after leading 92 of the 267 laps of the LifeLock.com 400. "In the beginning of the race I felt like we had a great race car and a good shot at winning tonight, but it comes with the territory. Stuff happens."

Johnson's night, which started on the front row, began to unravel on Lap 91 when he missed the entrance to pit road. He pitted one lap later while leading the race and left in third.

"Well, coming to pit road, I hit the brakes to slow down and the car had a lot of rear brake percentage in it that I didn't expect it to have," Johnson said. "It didn't have that in my practice runs when I was trying to get to pit road. I just didn't expect the car to try to rotate around on the brakes coming to pit road like it did and I almost spun out so I missed pit road that time."

That wasn't a make-or-break situation, however, as the No. 48 was able to get back to the front and reach race leader Jamie McMurray in the No. 1 Chevrolet.

"It wasn't a big deal until I got turned around on the backstretch," Johnson said.

On lap 137, Johnson spun out while racing the No. 56 Toyota of Martin Truex Jr., who finished 11th.

"I think it was really just a racing thing," Johnson said. "He was trying to squeeze his way in between me and the white line and I came up off the white line a little bit. The airflow changed as he got close to me. I could feel it when he got close to me and it just started my car into a slide so at that point I was just hanging on and it finally turned around on me."

His car suffered minor damage and Johnson took it to pit road to have the grass cleaned off the splitter from the spin. Johnson returned to the track in 25th.

"After that we were coming up through the field and I felt like we could still salvage a top five or something and I cut a right front tire down and then just got in the wall," he said. "Between sliding through the grass and touching the wall it messed up the body and the nose started dragging pretty bad there for the final run or two."

Appearing to be not too worried about the night's events -- he remains third in the Cup Series points standings -- Johnson said, "We'll be back in a couple weeks."

The Cup Series is off next weekend, but will resume racing at Indianapolis Motor Speedway July 24. Johnson and company have won three of the past four Brickyard 400s. His most recent two Brickyard wins were back-to-back, making Johnson the only driver in the series to have consecutive Cup wins at the storied venue.