November 5, 2012
By Matthew Pizzolato
Matthew Pizzolato
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Regardless of whether or not he wins the championship this season, Jimmie Johnson has made one fact irrevocably clear. He excels during The Chase.
It's not so much that the new point system favors him, it's the tracks that NASCAR races at during the Chase. Officials tried reshuffling the point format slightly in recent years, but Johnson has shown that it didn't faze him.
Johnson is a master of the mile and half track and those circuits make up the majority of the dates on the schedule during the Chase. So, as long as those same tracks appear during the postseason, the points are still going to add up the same way; that is Johnson is most likely going to accumulate the majority of them.
NASCAR has two options if they want a driver other than Johnson to win the championship. They can either give Johnson a point handicap at the start of The Chase, or they can put a greater variety of track types in the postseason. Neither one of those options is very likely and probably wouldn't work anyway.
Last season, Johnson admitted that he was beaten by the performances of Carl Edwards and Tony Stewart, who won the title by virtue of a tie breaker over Edwards. Johnson finished sixth in the final point standings, which is the lowest he's ever placed since he's been racing in NASCAR full time. It seems to have inspired him this year.
What last season proves is that the only way to keep Johnson from winning championships is to go out and beat him on the track. Yet as good as he is, that's something that just doesn't happen very often.
He's currently engaged in a fight with Brad Keselowski to win championship number six, and he knows it's far from over.
"The championships I've won, I saw a lot of amazing things out of my competition. I'm certainly seeing that with Brad. So it's just that familiar space where you can't count him out," Johnson was quoted as saying last week at Martinsville. "I have to expect that. We all do. That goes for the rest of the year. I guess I see more of a familiar, never quit, fight to the end attitude out of the 2 team that I've seen with some of the best in the sport, if it's Tony Stewart or Jeff Gordon, Denny, when I raced him, Mark Martin, they have that tenacity to stay after it and they're doing a great job."
It's not surprising that Johnson is very likely to surpass Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt's previously thought to be untouchable record of seven championships sooner rather than later. At the rate he is going, winning ten championships before his career is finished is not inconceivable.
Other than Richard Petty's 200 race win total, Johnson's streak of five consecutive championships is probably the only other unbreakable record in the sport.
NASCAR instituted The Chase in 2004 and of the eight completed seasons under that format, Johnson has won the championship five times.
If he keeps winning titles at that rate, NASCAR might as well change its name to the Jimmie Johnson Invitational Series. For some reason, JJIS just doesn't have the same ring to it that NASCAR does.
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