After leading the NASCAR standings nearly all of the regular season, Jimmie Johnson has plummeted to ninth after one race of the playoffs.
That could mean he has the other nine contenders in the Chase for the Nextel Cup just where he wants them.
“We’re 139 points down [with nine races left],” Johnson said. “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 the autumn of 2004, streaking through one of NASCAR’s worst tragedies ever. One of his Hendrick Motorsports team’s planes crashed, killing all 10 people aboard, on the way to a race he won.
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“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 the onslaught through the shock and grief brought Johnson the championship of ’04, it surely would have been the most memorable title in the history of NASCAR. But it turned out only as 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, Johnson has been saying he has a different feeling, that this really is his year at last.
Even after last weekend, even after being wrecked and winding up 39th at Loudon, N.H., Johnson hasn’t flinched from his feeling.
“My guys have done the math,” he said of his No. 48 Chevrolet team. “We need to outscore the 29 [leader Kevin Harvick] by 15.4 points [per race] from this point on to end up in the points lead.”
That’s a matter of about three or four positions per race on the variable points-award scale. And at several of the tracks left in the Chase, Johnson has been significantly stronger than Harvick.
But Harvick is hot, having won both the last regular-season race and the Chase opener, and Johnson has been cold since winning Aug. 6 at Indianapolis.
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 regular season. But Johnson was already locked into the playoffs, so position in the standings was largely psychological.
“We definitely got off to a start we didn’t want [in the Chase],” Johnson said. “That’s racing. Stuff happens.
“I know momentum. It’s easy to watch teams pick it up and have it.
“At the same time, teams lose it and [other] teams pick it up. We can trace back, and [Harvick’s team] has been slowly coming along.
“Now those guys are on fire. I’ve been in that position. [Then] the fire has gone out and somebody else comes along.”
Johnson is heading into a series of tracks that beckon him to another hot streak.
The Chase continues Sunday at Dover, Del., where Johnson is defending race champion. In fact, in only nine starts at Dover International Speedway, Johnson has three wins and seven top-10 finishes. Harvick is winless at Dover, has led there only once, and is eighth among current Chasers in average finish there, 16.272 in 11 tries.
“We’re going in with lofty expectations,” Johnson said, “and feel we should be up front.”
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