Imago
Image Credits: Imago
Imago
Image Credits: Imago
Milk and cookies. That was what led to one of NASCAR’s most successful driver-crew chief partnerships. The year was 2005, and a young Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus had locked horns in frustration until team owner Rick Hendrick came up with a plan that became the unlikely start of their legendary partnership.
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During the April 28 appearance on the Stacking Pennies podcast, Jimmie Johnson opened up about the milk and cookies story between him and Chad Knaus. Johnson recalled how in 2004 and 2005, the #48 team lost the championship. On top of that, there was the system where HMS had allowed crew chiefs to build their silos and departments for a more centralized engineering group.
It is because of this that Knaus had too much work, which led to a lot of anxiety and stress, and a burnout in sight. But what that also led to was tension with his driver, which Rick Hendrick saw and decided to resolve in a quirky way.
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“Rick intended to have this meeting with us, but Chad and I were just fighting like kids,” Johnson described. “And so he decided, ‘Well, if you guys are going to act like kids, I’m going to treat you like kids.’ And we walk into his office, half a gallon of milk, two Mickey Mouse plates, a pile of cookies, and he made us eat cookies and drink milk and hash it out, and like full-blown Mickey Mouse plates.
“And at first, we thought it was funny, and then Rick insists, and we can tell Rick’s pissed, and it’s like, ‘All right, we better eat these cookies.’ He makes us eat a second cookie. He’s just like grinding us.”
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DAYTONA BEACH, FL – FEBRUARY 16: Jimmie Johnson, driver of the #48 Lowe’s for Pros Chevrolet, talks to his crew chief, Chad Knaus, during practice for the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Florida. (Photo by Brian Lawdermilk/Getty Images)
To Johnson’s point, the No. 48 team was a real contender for the Series title in 2004 and 2005, recording eight and four victories, respectively. However, he fell short of the championship in both seasons. In 2004, he finished eight points behind Kurt Busch, and the following year, despite winning four races, inconsistency saw him finish fifth in points.
This defeat in 2005 led to a slew of arguments between the pair and almost resulted in them coming apart despite having 18 wins in their first four seasons. But Hendrick’s intervention came at a key point and saved the pairing.
In a 2024 interview, Rick Hendrick claimed that he brought the two in and asked them to ‘have a timeout.’
“Sometimes brothers, guys who are close, seem to have most friction,” Hendrick told SiriusXM radio. “I brought them in, and I said, ‘It’s amazing that you’ve had the success you’ve had, but now we are at a point where we are talking about Chad, you having another driver. Jimmie, having another crew chief.’ And I said, ‘When you think about it, you don’t know what you are going to get when we shuffle the deck.
Johnson recalled in another interview that Hendrick ‘really challenged’ Knaus and let him in on his own success as a car dealer. The 76-year-old instilled the importance of being able to trust people in Knaus, so it was ‘more of a collaborative effort.’
The driver-crew chief worked on that front all winter. And when they emerged from that winter in 2006, they took the first step in adding their names to NASCAR history.
Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus emerged from their rough patch as a force to be reckoned with
Right out of the gate in 2006, Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus opened their season with a win at the Daytona 500. Over the course of the year, they added four more victories. This time, however, their attitude and sense of partnership were stronger than before, following Rick Hendrick’s intervention. What came next was simply unprecedented.
After winning the championship in 2006, in the next four seasons, from 2007 to 2010, Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus won four titles in a row. This was the first time a driver had won five titles in a row, a feat unmatched to this day in NASCAR.
Johnson and Knaus would win two more championships in 2013 and 2016, taking their total title tally to 7, just as many as Dale Earnhardt Sr. and Richard Petty. On top of that, they won 81 Cup races.
To think that all of that could’ve fallen apart over frustrations and arguments is, in retrospect, a bit weird. But then what’s weirder is that all of that happened because of a timeout, some milk, and cookies.
Written by
Edited by
Deepali Verma