"I would be foolish to like any other format than the one in which I’ve won six championships, to be honest," Johnson said with a laugh. "Call a spade a spade."

The bitter taste from an 11th-place finish in the final Sprint Cup Series standings — the worst result of Johnson’s 13-year career — has galvanized the Hendrick Motorsports No. 48 team as it aims for its second chance at propelling Johnson to a record-tying seventh crown in NASCAR’s premier division. Though the new Chase format didn’t directly benefit him right out of the gate, Johnson said he was able to see and the count the blessings in a big-picture view.

"I entered this new phase of the playoff system thinking, I want full grandstands, I want sponsorship revenue where it was in the ’90s, I want our sport to thrive and be strong," Johnson said. "You know, the world is changing. … I’ve seen stats recently that show this format boosted ratings, boosted attendance — a lot of hype, a lot of excitement. I’m putting on my ‘what’s best for the sport’ hat, and if this is better for the sport, I’m in. I want this sport to succeed."

Success for Johnson seemed to come with ease during his run of five straight championships from 2006-2010, a stretch during which NASCAR made only minor alterations to its postseason format. The larger Chase overhaul came after the 2013 season, shortly after Johnson hoisted the Sprint Cup trophy for a sixth time.

Johnson said the timing of those two events was purely coincidental, with the former not a direct result of the latter in an effort to "Jimmie-proof" the Chase. Although the format wound up crowning Kevin Harvick’s No. 4 team — a Hendrick Motorsports affiliate with Stewart-Haas Racing — at season’s end, Johnson said his initial analysis of the new system before its rollout was favorable.

"At first blush when I was told about this in fall of ’13, going into the ’14 season, I thought, ‘man, this is going to fit the 48 great,’ " Johnson said. "I don’t think we did our job as a team last year, and I think that’s where we got beat is not by equipment — the 4 car won the championship with all the same equipment — it was what we did as a team. We weren’t the team we needed to be. I don’t think it’s an attempt to ‘Jimmie-proof’ it. I think it is harder — when you look at Kevin, he needed the last two races to be the champion. I think that speaks to it."

It’s tricky to characterize a season with a quartet of Victory Lane celebrations as a down year, but the charmed life and trademark bulletproof performance normally associated with Johnson and crew chief Chad Knaus were somehow missing from the 2014 portfolio.

"Even though he won four races and we kind of got in stride, it was not a Jimmie Johnson/Chad Knaus kind of year," team owner Rick Hendrick said. "Once you start having that bad luck and you wreck and you break, sometimes it just snowballs. You know what I thought about as we were going through all the years that we had no bad breaks and we won five back-to-back, hey, be thankful that you didn’t have crashes and somebody running into you. But it was just one of those years, and I think it makes us hungrier this year."

Even with the perception of an increased desire for winning, the business of the sport still lingers with talk of potential contract extensions for Johnson and Knaus, something Hendrick says will have a resolution soon.

"We’re already into that," Hendrick said, "and there’ll be some announcements here pretty quick."

In the meantime, the No. 48 bunch sits in another unfamiliar offseason place — soul-searching. Johnson said the new Chase format makes reaching stock-car racing’s pinnacle a more rigorous accomplishment, but conceded that his team needed more consistency to be in that mix last season.

Finding that commodity has been the focus of offseason assignments for Knaus and Co.

"We took a lot of time and reflected on where we had some breakdowns throughout the year — some being internal, some being external," Knaus said. "There were a lot things that maybe influenced and impacted how we were running, so we think we’ve got a lot of that stuff cleared up. We’ve got some new engineers and have the guys refocused, so I think we’re in a good spot."

"You know, it doesn’t do you any good to pick the easiest tracks or the best track," team owner Rick Hendrick said last week during the annual Charlotte Motor Speedway Media Tour. "If we’re going to have a rough race, then I’d rather have it in these five and a learning experience than when we get into it for real, when the points are counting and we’re trying to get into the Chase for his rookie year."
 
The 19-year-old driver, set for his second full XFINITY Series season this year with Hendrick Motorsports affiliate JR Motorsports, is scheduled to make his Sprint Cup debut in the No. 25 Chevrolet on March 29 at Martinsville Speedway, NASCAR’s shortest track and among the sport’s trickiest. From there, Elliott will tackle another short track April 25 at Richmond International Raceway before turning his attention toward stock-car racing’s longest event: The Coca-Cola 600 on May 24 at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
 
Elliott wraps his first Sprint Cup foray with two more historic venues — July 26 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Sept. 6 at Darlington Raceway — completing what Hendrick called "a good spread," with the races spaced out by design. With the NASCAR-mandated ban on testing taking effect this year, Hendrick said adding a degree of difficulty to the five-race schedule was crucial to help Elliott develop a feel for Sprint Cup competition.
 
"It’s going to be really hard for a guy like Chase not to have tests," the 65-year-old team owner said. "We’re throwing him into some really tough races, but you know it’s going to be the same for everybody and it’ll be a learning curve. Hopefully there’ll be enough tire tests that we’ll get some tests and feedback. It’s going to be the same for everyone, but I think the rookies are the ones that are really going to have to pay the price because they’re just not going to have the availability to have track time."

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The architects of Elliott’s limited schedule were Hendrick Motorsports executive vice president and general manager Doug Duchardt, plus the team’s array of crew chiefs — all working in conjunction with the youngster and his father, newly minted NASCAR Hall of Famer Bill Elliott. According to the younger Elliott, the scope of his early Sprint Cup itinerary was taking shape for 2015 even before Gordon’s decision to step aside.
 
"I think more or less, it was just to try to gain some experience," Chase Elliott said. "… That was just something that came up and it was an opportunity. (Team sponsor) NAPA was interested in doing it, and those five races were obviously something I was interested in doing and we kind of planned that out. That was all before anything else came out with Jeff."
 
Elliott has competed in XFINITY Series races at four of the five tracks on his 2015 Sprint Cup schedule. The only exception on the list is Martinsville, where he placed sixth and 20th in a pair of Camping World Truck Series events in 2013.
 
Still, a lack of experience hasn’t been much of an impediment for Elliott thus far. The boy wonder stifled a star-studded field loaded with Sprint Cup regulars to score his first XFINITY win last April at Texas Motor Speedway, then followed that with two more Victory Lane celebrations — at Darlington and Chicagoland Speedway — helping him clinch the crown with one race left on the schedule.
 
"I don’t see a problem," Bill Elliott said. "I think you can take the kid anywhere from what I saw this year from the XFINITY side, the way he competed. We talked a little bit about it and he said, ‘I really don’t want to do the speedway stuff because you really don’t learn a lot about the race car at those places.’ It’s more about just positioning and that sort of thing. He’d rather go … to those kind of places that you learn more about the car that will teach him more down the road, and I think that’s what’s important to him."