No doubt about it: Chase is Johnson’s to lose
By Jay Hart, Yahoo! Sports Oct 11, 11:28 pm EDT
FONTANA, Calif. – Juan Pablo Montoya has yet to finish outside the top five in this year’s Chase. Jeff Gordon has finished second two weeks in a row. Mark Martin’s average finish in the playoff is 3.5.
Yet all three trail Jimmie Johnson in the standings.
The Legend of the Fall flexed his autumn muscles Sunday, shrugging off the competition with relative ease and demoralizing them in the process. In winning the Pepsi 500 at Auto Club Speedway – his third straight win there and second victory in four Chase races – Johnson reconfirmed to his peers that their best simply isn’t good enough.
Jimmie Johnson won the Pepsi 500 on Sunday for his second victory in four Chase races.
Now, the chase (not for the championship but of the three-time defending champion) is really on as Johnson has taken over the points lead for the first time all season. And if you believe Gordon, he’s not giving it back.
“Unless they make a mistake, I don’t see how they lose,” Gordon said. “We finished second, and I felt like we were like in a second-class category.”
Consider the source, here – Jeff Gordon, a four-time champion and winner of more races than any active driver. He’s second class.
Though Johnson’s lead is only 12 points, Gordon’s is a very honest assessment of what’s to come. We have, after all, seen this movie three times before.
What happens next is Johnson goes to Charlotte, his second-favorite track on the schedule, and finishes somewhere in the top five, if not in victory lane. Then he heads to Martinsville, where he’ll collect his sixth win in the last seven races there. (Yes, he’s won five of the last six Martinsville races.)
By that point, Johnson will have distanced himself from whomever is in second place. But here is where the plot thickens.
Race No. 7 in the Chase is at Talladega, which roughly translates to “who the hell knows.” Johnson could win there or finish 43rd. He could leave Alabama with title No. 4 in the bag or get caught in a Big One and lose four spots in the standings.
Whichever happens, Talladega is the last great social-climbing hope for those second-class citizens wanting to hang with Mr. Johnson.
“We have four or five [top-five finishes] in a row and I’ve been losing points to the leader,” said Montoya, who finished third Sunday and sits third in the standings, 58 points back of Johnson. “You ain’t going to make any points on anybody. Everybody that runs good is going to be there. You just got to make sure you don’t lose any.
“Once you pass Martinsville and Talladega and you look at the points, you say, ‘OK, what do we need to do for that?’ ”
Pray?
For his part, Johnson isn’t getting ahead of himself, and that’s not just athlete-speak. With less than 10 laps to go in Sunday’s race, an eight-car wreck caused a 22-minute delay. As the drivers sat parked on the track while officials cleaned up the carnage, crew chief Chad Knaus asked Johnson over the radio if he was sleeping.
“No, doing a lot of thinking,” Johnson replied.
“Thinking about a big, shiny trophy?” Knaus joked.
“No,” said Johnson, who was leading the race. “I haven’t gotten that far yet.”
He was thinking about the pending restart and how he was going to hold off Gordon and Montoya. Neither seriously posed a threat to him, but Johnson wasn’t leaving anything to chance.
Knaus shut up, Johnson blew away Gordon and Montoya on the restart and moments later collected his fifth win of the season.
“We’re in a great position, but it’s way too early to start thinking about other things,” Johnson said afterward. “If we are in the hunt come Homestead [the final race of the season] or Phoenix [the penultimate race], it’s going to be the thoughts, the emotions, all of that is going to be so heavy on all of our shoulders that it’s going to be a tough grind.
“But right now, it’s early enough where we can kind of brush it off and say, ‘OK, we did what we needed to. Let’s go to Charlotte.’ ”
Where, according to the script, the Johnson coronation will continue.
