In his soft-spoken, no-brag, just-fact sort of way, Jimmie Johnson articulated what 11 other Chase contenders left here fearing Sunday.
“We’re happy to be hitting our stride at this point in the season,” Johnson said after winning Saturday night’s Chevy Rock&Roll 400 for his second straight Nextel Cup victory, his sixth of the season and a sweep of both races at Richmond International Raceway this year.
“As everybody knows, it was a little bit of a tough summer for us. But everything is working right now.”
Johnson had started the season at a blistering pace, winning four races. But after the fourth, here on May 6, he fell into the summer doldrums that have become routine for him and his No. 48 branch of the Hendrick Motorsports team.
Not until last week at Fontana, Calif., did he win again, but then he roared through here with another.
So now he enters NASCAR’s playoffs, which begin Sunday at Loudon, N.H., not just as the top seed but as the driver with gale-force momentum in his sails.
That’s a few weeks early for his pattern. Last year he had to fly ferociously out of a mid-Chase hole to win the championship. Now he’s building a mountain for the 11 other Chasers to climb.
With his six victories, Johnson will start the Chase with 5,060 points, 20 more than senior teammate Jeff Gordon, who has 5,040 by virtue of his four regular-season victories.
The really bad news for competitors is that Johnson’s California Speedway triumph came in a traditional car, and Richmond was a jaunt in a Car of Tomorrow. Further, California is a 2-mile “intermediate” track, and Richmond is a 3/4 -mile short track.
So Johnson evidently has all the technological bases covered for the Chase.
This would augur a Johnson cakewalk to a repeat championship, except that three of the next four seeds in this year’s Chase have past championships under their belts: Gordon (four), third seed Tony Stewart (two) and fifth seed Kurt Busch (one — the first under the Chase format in 2004).
Eighth seed Matt Kenseth was the last champion under the old, full-season, Winston Cup points format.
All that savvy bunched up behind him is enough to keep Johnson from getting comfortable.
As for favorites …
“I look at Jeff Gordon, all the ups and downs he’s been through,” Johnson said. “I look at Stewart probably ahead of us.
“I think we’re there and probably third, but argue that against Kenseth … “
And fourth-seeded Carl Edwards, with two victories, “is not a dark horse,” Gordon said. “He’s one of the five or six guys who are favorites.”
The Chase is laden with star power, with the glaring exception of Dale Earnhardt Jr., whose Chevrolet blew an engine with six laps to go Saturday night and ended his long-shot bid to crack into the top 12, and the Chase, in the last race of the regular season.
As an entry, the Hendrick juggernaut has to be favored not just in strength but sheer numbers, with three drivers in the playoffs: Johnson, Gordon and ninth-seeded Kyle Busch.
Stewart and sixth-seeded Denny Hamlin are the Joe Gibbs Racing contingent, and Hamlin won the first Loudon race of this season.
Richard Childress Racing also put a pair into the playoffs, Jeff Burton and Clint Bowyer, seeded 10th and 12th, respectively.
But Johnson and Gordon will be operating unshackled through the fall, where through the heart of the summer they were handicapped severely and went winless. In June, Johnson crew chief Chad Knaus and Gordon crew chief Steve Letarte were given six-race suspensions for bodywork violations at Sonoma, Calif., and didn’t return until mid-August.
Knaus dismissed any notion that his suspension might have had a toughening effect on the rest of his team.
“There’s no benefit to that happening,” Knaus said. “There’s only downside. Yes, I was [at the Hendrick complex] in Charlotte for six weeks. Did it help our race team? Absolutely not. Did it prove that our race team is extremely well-trained and dedicated to the sport? Absolutely it did.”
Whatever the case, Knaus is back atop the pit box for the playoffs. And Johnson is back in his blistering stride of early season.
That means the first repeat championship in the four-year history of the Chase format, if not imminent, is on the horizon.
———
ehinton@tribune.com
