SPARTA, Ky. -- Pure and simple, Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s fans thought Jimmie Johnson and crew chief Chad Knaus violated their gentlemen's agreement when they opted to pit late in last Saturday's Coke Zero 400 at Daytona while Earnhardt remained on the track.

Johnson was supposed to push Earnhardt to victory -- or at least try to -- as a return favor from Talladega, where a push from Earnhardt got Johnson to the finish line .002 seconds ahead of Clint Bowyer.

Earnhardt fans viewed Knaus' call to bring Johnson to the pits on Lap 159 -- before the first of two attempts at a green-white-checkered-flag finish -- as a broken promise, and they bombarded Johnson's Twitter account with angry postings. Over time, Johnson said, the postings became more conciliatory.

"As time went on and the more I checked in on Twitter, I saw a lot of support from his fans," Johnson said Friday at Kentucky Speedway. "In the beginning, there was plenty of creative messages on there for me.

"As time went on, I was really impressed and appreciate the support from Junior Nation and then also my fan base defending me, and still, at the end of the day, every fan is entitled to their own opinion. There are different things that exist inside the garage area and a different reality than people see. It's been fun. It was my first real experience to how active social media can be following a race."

Earnhardt said he was surprised at the strong reaction from his fan base.

"I was, but these people are passionate," Earnhardt said. "I don't know if I should be that surprised by anything [with] the fans, because they're passionate, you know. They get it in their minds what they think is right, what they think happened, and they just run with it.

"People have strong opinions. I heard about how they beat on Jimmie a little on his Twitter page. I told him -- I called him up -- I said, 'Now you know why I don't have Twitter.' I'd be getting it every week."

About the perceived slight itself, Earnhardt said there were no hard feelings. Both Earnhardt and Johnson said they haven't even discussed the matter. After all, Earnhardt was moving toward the front, with help from Jeff Burton, before a huge wreck off the final corner knocked him sideways into the infield grass.

"They [Johnson and Knaus] made a decision to do one thing, and we did another, and there really wasn't much else to it," Earnhardt said. "It was pretty cut and dried. It didn't really bother me at all. I figured that Jimmie would still have a good opportunity to get up to me and help us -- and we're in fine shape, until people forgot how to drive, or people thought that they could disobey the laws of physics, or whatever they were trying to do."

Leave Kansas alone

If Jeff Gordon had his way, the repaving project Kansas Speedway announced Thursday would be scrapped before it started.

Gordon concedes, however, that underlying issues might have hastened the decision to repave the track where he won the inaugural race in 2001. Kansas Speedway president Pat Warren cited the harshness of Midwest winters as one of the primary reasons.

The project, which includes reconfiguring the track with variable banking and the construction of an infield road course, will take place between next year's spring and fall races at Kansas, with the exact dates of those two events still to be set.

"Kansas, to me, should not be repaved," Gordon said. "But it might be a foundation issue. It might be a drainage issue. There's deeper stories behind the scenes that we maybe don't know as competitors, so they do what they need to do.

"I'm not a fan, because the new pavement that exists out there is so smooth and is not very abrasive. Goodyear has a very difficult time building tires for the new repaves because it just generates so much heat, but they don't dissipate the heat by having abrasiveness. I just wish we could talk to the companies that are doing the paving and find a way to put some abrasiveness into [it]."

To accomplish that, Gordon would like speedways and paving companies to look into possible changes to the composition of the asphalt.

"A lot of it is just in the aggregate," Gordon said. "The aggregate that is in the newer pavement is so small, and very little of it is at the surface. So that is what has caused a lot of issues. But it lasts 10 times as long as the old pavement. Certainly, for whatever reasons, the tracks feel it is necessary to do that, but I wish there was a way to meet in the middle on it."

One of the saving graces will be the progressive banking, which will reach 20 degrees at the high points of the corners.

"The variable banking certainly will help," Gordon conceded. "We saw that at Homestead. But you're still going to have a very fast race track, a very smooth race track, which a lot of times makes for less side-by-side racing in the first event or two.

"I love the surface at Kansas, so I think that's one of the reasons why Kansas stands out to me. It's a great surface right now. To me, it's perfect. You're slipping and sliding. You're running up against the wall, in the middle, at the bottom. How can the racing get much better than it is at Kansas?"

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Kansas set to undergo renovation project in 2012