January 4, 2010
By Matthew Pizzolato
Matthew Pizzolato
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Jimmie Johnson has won the last four Championships in a row. While that achievement is utterly amazing, it has completely overshadowed another stunning accomplishment, one that boggles the mind.
Johnson has raced full time in NASCAR the past eight seasons and during that time, he has never finished lower that fifth place in the final point standings. His rookie season of 2002, he finished in fifth place and won three races.
He finished second in the final points in both 2003 and 2004. In 2003, he remained in the top 10 in points all thirty-six weeks of the season and was the only driver to do so that year. The next year, he landed in second spot, only 8 points behind the champion Kurt Busch, making 2004 the closest championship chase in history. During a stretch between those two stunning years, he remained in the top ten in points for 70 consecutive weeks.
All of this coming from a driver only in his third season of full time competition. In 2005, he again finished fifth in the points, matching the worst finish of his career. And the last four seasons, he's wrapped up first place in the standings. Has there ever been another driver to achieve such phenomenal success at any stage of his career?
Jimmie Johnson and the 48 team have set a new standard for success in the NASCAR garage. When most teams have a bad year, they struggle the entire season and don't even qualify for the Chase. A bad year for Johnson occurs when he doesn't win the Championship.
As a result of all his success, NASCAR recently named Johnson as the Driver of the Decade for the Cup Series, and The Associated Press named him Male Athlete of the Year for 2009. The AP award has been around for 78 years, and this is the first time it has been won by a racecar driver.
Johnson cemented his Driver of the Decade status by winning 47 races, the most by any driver in the series during that time span. In 291 starts, he has 180 top ten finishes and 117 top five finishes. He joins an elite group of drivers to have won four or more Championships: Dale Earnhardt, Richard Petty and Jeff Gordon.
The excuse that a lot of people like to use for his success is that the Chase for the Championship point format plays to his strengths because the tracks that make up the Chase are tracks where Johnson excels.
However, The Chase was not instituted by NASCAR until 2004. Johnson competed his first two full seasons under the old points format, finishing fifth and second in the points respectively. The argument could be made that not changing the point format wouldn't have hampered him at all.
He's already completely rewritten the history books and will more than likely shatter them before his career is finished. And Johnson knows that his accomplishments are quite special.
"The fact that nobody has done this, I think it puts me near the top. I certainly look at the seven championships by both Earnhardt and Petty, their race wins, their being in the sport for an amount of years and all that they've done," he said in a David Caraviello article for nascar.com. "Those two guys are kind of in a draw at the top. Hopefully my stats and win totals and championship totals can rival theirs. But it puts us up there, it really does. And the cool thing is, we're not done yet. We've got a lot of racing left ahead of us, so hopefully we can improve on that."
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