Johnson loses race by just passing through

Making a great move back on the track, Johnson anticipated that a caution was going to come out. If the caution had been thrown, a ton of cars would have gone a lap down, and he would have been in pretty good shape. Johnson probably would have come to pit road and taken four fresh tires, which would have put him in position to win the race.

Unfortunately for Johnson, the caution did not wave. When he finally came back around to make a green-flag stop, he knew that he had given up a lot of time slowing down to come to pit road and then getting back up to speed on the last lap. There's a chance that he went over the speed limit to make up ground.

A 14th-place finish has to be pretty disheartening for that group, but there's no question that luck is a big part of this Chase. In a lot of cases, you make your own luck. At Dover, Kasey Kahne had bad luck because he got caught up in Tony Stewart's wreck, but if Kahne had qualified better, he wouldn't have been back there to begin with. You can use the word "luck" a lot, but normally, you can trace it back to something else that the team did or didn't do to lead to that bad luck.

Prior to 2005, fans, teams, drivers and everyone else questioned pit road speeding penalties because speeds were checked with a handheld stopwatch at random from NASCAR's control tower or by people on the roof. Starting last year, the loops on pit road recorded speed with a bulletproof printout that every team could see. So many people got busted early last year that NASCAR added a five mph buffer.

If pit road speed at Kansas was 45 mph, Johnson was going in excess of 50 in at least one of the eight to 10 sections of pit road measured by loops. He only had to be speeding in one of those sections to get penalized. The penalty under green is called a pass-through. The driver has to come back to pit road. He doesn't have to stop in his pits, but he must maintain pit road speed. His Hendrick Motorsports teammate, Kyle Busch, was caught speeding under caution at lap 196, and the penalty under caution is starting at the tailend of the longest line.

FOX race analyst Larry McReynolds has more than 25 years of NASCAR experience as a mechanic, crew chief and broadcaster. He and his fellow Crew Chief Club members take you behind the wall at www.crewchiefclub.com.

"How to Become a Winning Crew Chief" is on bookstore shelves, or you may order your own autographed copy from www.DWStore.com.