Johnson captures Texas

The seven-time series champion is now a seven-time winner at Texas Motor Speedway as Jimmie Johnson won the O’Reilly Auto Parts 500 Sunday… Johnson, after spinning during the first round of qualifying on Friday, had to start in the back of the field on Sunday after the Loews team chose to replace his flat spotted tires for new ones which breaks the NASCAR rule that the cars must start the race with the tires they qualified on… It’s the sixteenth straight year Jimmie has won a race in NASCAR’s top series… Sunday’s win was the eighty-first of his career and the first win in twenty-seventeen for Hendrick Motorsports… The win puts Johnson in the playoffs and awards him five playoff points… He currently is eleventh in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series standings… Winning stages one and two and dominating much of the first half of the race was Ryan Blaney… Blaney picked up forty-five points, two playoff points, lead the race four times for the most laps in a race for his career with one hundred forty-eight, but ended up with only a twelfth place finish… The Wood Brothers driver elected to stay out during a late stage two caution to secure the stage win but got out of pit sequence with the other teams and couldn’t recover… After Johnson, the top five finishers were: Kyle Larson, Joey Logano, pole-sitter Kevin Harvick, and Dale Earnhardt Jr