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Nov 18
Johnson takes a 108-point lead into the season's final race at Homestead-Miami Speedway and will clinch his record fourth straight NASCAR Sprint Cup championship if he finishes 25th or better in the Ford 400. Homestead is not one of Johnson's better tracks in the Chase -- he has never won a race at the 1 1/2-mile oval and has two top-five and five top-10 finishes in eight starts. But part of the reason Johnson's stats are so unimpressive at Homestead is the last three years, he hasn't had to win the race to clinch the championship. He has two top-10 finishes in his last three races at Homestead but was 15th last year. "We need to show up down there (Homestead-Miami Speedway) and treat it like any other race," Johnson said. "The further forward we start, the better we are going to be, track position-wise."
Johnson blew away the field at Phoenix, leading four times for 238 laps to win for the seventh time this season and 47th time in his career. One week after his worst race in the Chase -- a 38th-place finish at Texas when he crashed on the third lap -- Johnson and his team made a powerful statement. "In the end it could be looked at that way," Johnson said. "I could say from living it, it wasn't necessarily a statement, it was, 'Hey guys, we need to step up today and get it done.' Chad (Knaus, the crew chief) and I had conversations in the team meeting that 'We need to show what we're made of; we need to get this done today. I guess in the end it could have been a statement that we're sending. But we knew we had to come out today and run well. We knew this was going to be a great track for the 5 (Martin) and also for the 24 (Jeff Gordon). The only way to get any points on them would be to lead the most laps and win the race. We did it. I'm very proud of the fact we looked each other in the eyes, knew what we had to do, and delivered. It wasn't easy. There was a lot of pressure on us to do this. All week long, thinking about this race, wondering if we could come back and step up like we did today, there were just a lot of thoughts that go through the brain. I'm very, very proud of how we delivered and rose to the occasion."
In the Chase era of NASCAR Sprint Cup racing, nobody does it better than this team. Of Johnson's 47 career wins, 17 (36.2 percent) have come in the Chase. He has won 28.8 percent of the 59 Chase races held since the format began in 2004.
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