Milk and cookies led to five straight NASCAR championships
Jimmie Johnson burst into the NASCAR scene in 2002. He began collecting trophies immediately, claiming three wins during his rookie season. Another three wins came in 2003, eight in 2004 and four more in 2005.
The No. 48 team was winning races. But, they came up short of a championship, finishing 2nd in the standings, twice.
Driver Jimmie Johnson as well as his crew chief, Chad Knaus were frustrated that they couldn’t bring home a title following the 2005 season. And, they both voiced frustrations with their team owner Rick Hendrick.
Hendrick took it upon himself to call a meeting with both of them. He brought milk and cookies to the meeting as his star driver and his crew chief were both acting like ‘babies.’
Rick Hendrick recalled, “We were trying to decide if we were going to separate them. You wanna act like children, then why don’t we have some milk and cookies. And we’ll sit on the floor and have timeout.”
After that meeting, Johnson won five straight NASCAR Cup Series championships. It was a streak that wasn’t to be mathematically possible under a new playoff format.
So, what happened in that meeting?
Jimmie Johnson recalls the milk and cookies meeting
“The frustration of being so close was really the foundation of the frustration and anger,” Jimmie Johnson recalled of the 2005 season.
“The week after Homestead, we were just angry and mad. Both of us had spoken to Rick. Evidently, acting like a baby or a kid.”
“And, it led Rick to that — to the idea for that meeting. And he called us in.”
Hendrick famously brought milk and cookies to the meeting.
“After Rick truly demanded us to eat cookies and to drink the milk. Cause we — Okay fine, we break the cookies. He’s like, ‘No, eat the cookies.’ “
“We take a bite. He’s like, “Take a bigger bite and drink the milk.’ “
“Rick keeps pushing us to get into the experience. Then, gives us both a chance to air what’s on our minds. Then, we honestly got into a real conversation in many ways.”
“No joke, we left that meeting and changes our course in how we worked. We went in a different direction.”
“2006 takes place. We come out of the gate, we win the Daytona 500. We win our first championship, win the next championship, on and on and on.”
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Chad Knaus recalls the meeting
“It was a really tough time for me,” Chad Knaus stated.
“We had such a steep trajectory. Really thought that we should have won the championship by then. We had a very good opportunity to win the championship in 2002, our very first year.”
“When I sat in that meeting, I’ll be frank and I’ll tell you I walked out of that meeting and I remember vividly, I was embarrassed.”
“I was embarrassed that Mr. Hendrick had to sit us down. Two grown men with the opportunity of a lifetime. We were sitting there, just letting it go away.”
“I was like, ‘I’m not doing this anymore.’ I’m going to take the advice of a man who had mentored us and change the structure of the No. 48 team.”
“we worked on giving the engineers, more skin in the game. We worked on putting more emphasis on the engineers, on the car chief Ron Malec. Giving everybody a little bit more tangible interest in the team as opposed to me doing it all.”
“I was building the shocks, setting up the cars, putting the bodies on the cars. I was doing it all prior to that. It was very selfish, very selfish for me to go through that.”
“Trust me, I made a lot of mistakes after that. But, that did set the foundation of where we were going to be in the future.”
Jimmie Johnson added, “I just thought you were overworked. He had the shortest fuse. He was covering so much territory. We got comfortable delegating. It gave him more bandwidth to really run and operate the team on a different level. The championships just started coming.”
Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus were both just added to the NASCAR Hall of Fame. Rick Hendrick brought Milk and Cookies to the stage during introductions.
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