How hard is it to repeat as Nextel Cup champion in this era of stampede competition and crapshoot playoffs?
“Go to Vegas,” advises Tony Stewart, who won the NASCAR title in 2005 but missed the Chase for the Cup entirely last year. “Let them tell you what the odds are of spinning a ball on a roulette wheel and hitting 00, and it coming up again the next time.”
There hasn’t been a repeat champion since Jeff Gordon in 1997-98, and that was under the old, season-long points system with no playoffs.
“[The Chase format] makes it two or three times harder to win,” says Rick Hendrick, the last team owner to send a driver to back-to-back titles–and the one with a chance to do it this year.
Defending champion Jimmie Johnson has the best shot any driver could have at repeating under current conditions, say Hendrick and Gordon, who co-own Johnson’s branch of the Hendrick Motorsports empire.
In fact, Hendrick rates Johnson’s chances as “awfully good.”
That’s because, in Stewart’s roulette analogy, Johnson and crew chief Chad Knaus have hit numbers adjacent to 00 all five seasons they have been in the Cup series.
That is, they have been contenders every time.
“Just to think back, we’ve led the points all five years and been in contention,” Johnson says. “So it has been a magical thing here.”
All three years of the Chase, Johnson has entered the final race at Homestead-Miami with a shot at the title. In 2004 he won four of the final six races and fell just eight points short of Kurt Busch.
“I feel like the chemistry is as good with Chad and Jimmie right now as it was with Ray [Evernham] and Jeff when they did ’em back-to-back,” Hendrick says.
But the scramble of the Chase isn’t the only obstacle.
“Back then we didn’t have four top contenders,” Hendrick says, picking his four top threats to a Johnson repeat:
– Stewart, the 2002 and ’05 champion, in Joe Gibbs Racing Chevrolets.
– Matt Kenseth, ’03 champion and ’06 runner-up to Johnson, in Roush Racing Fords.
– Kasey Kahne, winner of six races last season, most of any driver on the tour, in Dodges fielded by Evernham, now a team owner.
– The maestro himself, four-time champion Gordon, still Hendrick’s senior driver.
One unknown for all the top teams is the Car of Tomorrow, the revolutionary NASCAR design that will be mandated for 16 of the 36 Cup races this year as a three-season phase-in begins.
“We’d better not miss a beat,” the ever-intense Knaus says. “As many times as we race that car this year, we’re going to have to be spot-on when we unload it at Bristol [Tenn., for the first COT race on March 25].”
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But Johnson has confidence in his crew chief and the Hendrick organization, whose next Cup victory will be its 150th.
“Historically, if you look at Hendrick Motorsports and especially the 48 team, when new rules come along we adjust fast,” Johnson says. “I’m not saying we’ll be the best [with the COT], but I am encouraged because I know with this new challenge we’ll be on the front side of the learning curve.”
NASCAR’s two biggest races, the Daytona 500 and the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis–both of which Johnson won last year–won’t be affected this year by the COT. And only one restrictor-plate race–he won two of the four last year–will require the COT, the fall event at Talladega, Ala.
The burdens a champion carries throughout the next season–a deluge of additional media attention, an intensified schedule of sponsor- and NASCAR-related public appearances and myriad other distractions–can complicate any shot at repeating.
“Personality has a lot to do with it,” Gordon says. “Jimmie has a well-balanced personality. He’s calm, he’s down to earth. And he’s surrounded by good people, like I was when I came into the sport.
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