Sprint Cup Crown Remains Jimmie Johnson's to Lose

The chaos of Lap 3 last Sunday at Texas Motor Speedway certainly tossed the NASCAR world into a frenzy.

When the dust settled, version one of the No. 48 Texas Chevrolet became version two and both Mark Martin and Jeff Gordon failed to add the word "clutch" to their 2009 resumes, one point about NASCAR's most dominant driver became exceedingly clear.

Jimmie Johnson, point being, is still the de facto guy to beat for the 2009 Sprint Cup championship -- and it's going to take plenty more Texas-like highly unlikely events to keep three-time from becoming four-time.

Johnson, for the the under the rock crowd, was tapped by an out-of-control Sam Hornish Jr. off of turn two at Texas in a lap 3 incident. Johnson's car sidestepped into a glancing shot off the outside wall before spinning back across the track and slamming the inside wall.

An hour and eight minutes later, Johnson was back on track with a rebuilt race car that struggled around the track but did finish. Johnson earned a 38th-place finish and just 49 points towards his championship effort.

Mark Martin, second in points before Texas, was in the most prime of positions to capitalize but couldn't ever get over the the hump during the 500-miler. Martin's team, though, played the fuel mileage finish well and came across the start/finish line for a fourth-place finish and collected 160 points.

It was enough to gain 110 points on Johnson, but a win would have meant so much more.

Jeff Gordon, the leader at that point in the race of Johnson's crash, could have taken a huge pre-Texas deficit of 192 and sliced into a 46-point Johnson lead had he stayed out front and earned a sweep of the Sprint Cup trips to Texas in 2009. Instead, he faltered and wound up 13th, trailing Johnson by 112 points with two races left.

The 70-point jump was Gordon's biggest gain on Johnson in the 2009 Chase for the Sprint Cup, but it wasn't near enough to put him back in serious contention for a fifth Sprint Cup championship.

Serious contention, of course, doesn't factor in Johnson hitting any walls in the final two races or otherwise ending up stopped in the garage area long before the race is over. Why? Because it just doesn't happen.

If you want to find a race in Chase that Johnson finished worse than what he did Sunday, you'll look back to the first race of the 2006 Chase. Johnson finished 39th at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, but managed to still win his first Cup title.

Since then and until Texas, Johnson's worst finishes have been a 24th at Talladega in '06, two 15th-place finishes at Texas and Homestead last season and three 14th-place finishes with two in 2007 at Dover and Charlotte and the other at Kansas in 2006. He's also got a13th-place finish at Dover in 2006.

Aside from those and Sunday's race at Texas, Johnson has scored a 29 top-10s in 38 Chase races.

Then, there's the fact that Johnson is heading to a track that his No. 48 team has excelled at. Phoenix International Raceway has hosted a Jimmie Johnson victory lane celebration three times in his career and he's picked up 7 top-5s and 10 top-10s at the Arizona 1-miler.

Johnson's worst outings at Phoenix have been a pair of 15th-place finishes in 2002 and 2005. In the Chase races that have seen him go on to be champion, though, Johnson has averaged a gaudy finish of 1.3 with two wins and a second-place finish.

That can't be heartening for Martin and Gordon.

In terms of points, Johnson's critical number of the next two weeks is 318.

Mark Martin, if he won the next two races and lead the most laps, would earn 390 points. If Johnson earns the 318, there's nothing Martin could do to prevent the championship. Going to third in points with Jeff Gordon (and pending Martin has a mediocre run in the next two weeks) Johnson needs to score just 278 points to overcome a Gordon domination of the final two races.

The magic finishing position number for Johnson is 4th pending two Martin wins and 8th pending two Gordon wins.

As it turns out, Johnson's finish at Texas might have been comparable to watching an underdog football team run back the opening kickoff of the second half in a marginally close game with a top-ranked squad. Sure, the brief hope of an upset crosses everyone's minds. All too often, though, the expected becomes the reality -- with or without SEC football officials patrolling the sidelines.

Jimmie Johnson showed he's just as vulnerable to misfortune as any other driver in the field at Texas, but just as good, dominant football teams do -- he and the rest of the No. 48 team are highly, highly unlikely to let the losses keep mounting.