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Kasey Kahne said his famous Hendrick Motorsports teammates, Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr., were at the top of their games when he joined the team but were also nearing the end of their careers.
Kahne made the comments on the Stacking Pennies podcast.
Kahne: ‘On the back side of it’
“They were all on at the top of their games, also kind of on the back side of it,” Kahne said. “Jeff left or retired pretty quickly from when I was there. Then Dale, Jimmie… they all kind of had been doing it a long time, had a ton of experience, looked at things differently than what I did, and then sometimes, similar.”
“And at that same time, we were starting to get a lot more data and kind of understand how each one of us were driving. And you had that at the test, but then it started coming into the races a little bit, the simulator stuff started coming, and then kind of we all basically had moved on. But yeah, it was a neat lineup there.”
Johnson vs. Gordon
Kahne said Johnson and Gordon drove very differently.
“I always felt like Jimmie and Jeff drove pretty differently. I thought Jimmie, to me, I always just thought he carried a lot of speed,” Kahne said. “He was really good at carrying speed into the corner, carrying throttle through the corner, things like that when there was a lot more off-throttle time, and he was always like part throttle in places, and I felt that’s how I looked at it, and I kind of drove more like that.”
“Jeff was more aggressive and then off and then aggressive, and I’d put him more kind of like a Kevin Harvick style of driving. It was neat to be teammates with those guys.”
Kahne’s Hendrick years
Kahne replaced Mark Martin in Hendrick’s No. 5 Chevrolet in 2012. He won the Coca-Cola 600 and at New Hampshire that year and finished fourth in the standings, the best points finish of his Cup career. He won at Bristol and Pocono in 2013 and at Atlanta in 2014.
His last Hendrick win came in the 2017 Brickyard 400, when he held off Brad Keselowski in overtime to end a 102-race winless streak. He won six Cup races with Hendrick.
Gordon retired from full-time racing after 2015, Earnhardt after 2017, the same year Kahne left the team, and Johnson after 2020. Johnson won his record-tying seventh title in 2016.
Kahne and Elliott
Chase Elliott said last week that a radio comment from Kahne years ago changed the way he approaches races, as Pit This Time reported.
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