Johnson rallies, earns dramatic third-place finish at Richmond

A disappointing qualifying effort of 36th forced Johnson to drive his No. 48 Lowe's Chevy through nearly the entire field in Sunday's rain-delayed Toyota Owners 400 at Richmond International Raceway, making his third-place finish all the more dramatic -- perhaps too dramatic.

"We’ve got two wins and we’re making the most out of these poor starts and poor pit road picks,'' Johnson said. "We’ve got to get better on Fridays. I really think our race car, we worked hard to make it last in the long run and with all the long runs that we had, I was able to get through the field and get this Lowe’s Pro Service Chevy up front.

"Those last few restarts I was able to hang on and duke it out with those guys and get a nice top-three finish.”

Johnson has had four starts of 20th place or worse in nine races this season, but interestingly, they have produced some of his best finishes. He started 37th in Atlanta and ended up in Victory Lane. He started 20th in Phoenix two weeks later and rallied to finish 11th.

Johnson qualified 28th at Bristol, Tennessee, just last week and finished a head-shaking runner-up.

Clearly the cars have speed and Johnson's not a six-time champ for nothing, but the team is clearly focused on improving their starting positions.

"We were fast on Friday; we just didn't qualify well,'' Johnson's crew chief Chad Knaus said after Sunday's race. "I don't know. There's rumors of some inconsistent sets of tires. We don't know if maybe we got a goofy set of tires or something just wasn't matched up quite right, so I don't know.

"Bristol, I didn't expect to qualify very well anyway, so we kind of throw that one out. But I really thought we'd qualify in the top 10 here. Unfortunately we didn't, but we rolled on through there."

Sunday's determined effort was Johnson's third consecutive top-three including a win at Texas and the runner-up at Bristol, and he sits fourth in the driver standings -- a two-time winner and 25 points behind second place Joey Logano.

“We had a great race car and I really felt like that was the case on Friday, except for our qualifying lap,'' Johnson said. "I don’t know what happened on Friday and in general, I’m not the best qualifier. So Fridays, we’ve got to get those better in order to really win as often as we’d like to."

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