After leading the NASCAR standings nearly all of the regular season, Jimmie Johnson has plummeted to ninth place after one race of the playoffs. Which might mean he has the other nine Chase contenders just where he wants them.
With nine races left, "We're 139 points down," Johnson said this week. But, "We were 247 down in '04, with six races remaining, and lost [the championship] by only eight points."
He won four of those six races in in 2004, streaking through one of NASCAR's worst tragedies: One of his Hendrick Motorsports team's planes crashed, killing the 10 people aboard, on the way to a race he won.
With that in mind, "I look for those guys to be on quite a tear in the next five or six races," said Johnson's Hendrick teammate and mentor, four-time champion Jeff Gordon.
Had Johnson won the championship in 2004, it surely would have been the most memorable title in the history of NASCAR.
Instead, it was the nearest miss in the bittersweet saga of the son of a heavy equipment operator and a school bus driver from El Cajon, Calif. Johnson has been a championship contender late into every season since he arrived at the Nextel Cup level in 2002, but he still doesn't have a Cup to show for it.
This year, all year, Johnson has been saying he has a different feeling -- that this really is his year.
Even after Sunday, after being wrecked and winding up 39th at Loudon, N.H., to spoil his 31st birthday, Johnson didn't flinch from his feeling.
"My guys have done the math," he said of his No. 48 Chevrolet team. "We need to outscore the 29 [Chase leader Kevin Harvick, a friend of Johnson's since their formative years in Southern California] by 15.4 points [per race] from this point on to end up in the points lead."
That's a matter of three or four positions per race, roughly, on the variable points-award scale. And at several of the tracks remaining in the Chase, Johnson has been significantly stronger than Harvick.
Trouble is, Harvick is hot, having won the last regular-season race and the Chase opener, and Johnson has been cold since winning at Indianapolis on Aug. 6.
But after Indy, Johnson's team went into something of an experimental mode, seeking new advantages for the playoffs. The trial and error allowed Matt Kenseth to slip into the points lead late in the regular season, but Johnson was already locked into the playoffs, so position in the standings was largely psychological.
