Jimmie Johnson and No. 48 team so focused, can anything stop them?
Jimmie Johnson is finally slipping, showing some cracks in the armor. Yes, the three-time defending champion is becoming a bum.
At Martinsville, where he had won five of the last six races, Johnson couldn’t win. He didn’t even lead the most laps.
Loser.
All Johnson could manage was to finish second.
Funny enough, that felt like a victory to many of the fans in the stands. They went home satisfied that Johnson wasn’t the one holding up the trophy.
Apparently, the “Anybody But Jimmie” crowd doesn’t have much going for them these days. Foreign-born Juan Pablo Montoya was booed during driver introductions, but cheered wildly by the rural Virginia crowd when he passed Johnson for the lead early in the race.
The truth is, Johnson had yet another stellar Martinsville performance which, coupled with a slight slip-up by his closest competitor, teammate Mark Martin, left him with only one major speed bump (Talladega) standing between the 48 team and a fourth straight title.
With a 118-point lead over Martin, Johnson knows he simply needs to avoid gremlins to hoist the Sprint Cup trophy yet again; because he certainly isn’t going to be outrun by anyone.
“The mechanicals, the stuff we can’t control, is the stuff I’m worried about,” he said. “The stuff we can control, I feel we’re going to be great. If we have no issues, I
feel that we can race for this championship and things will turn out as we want.”
So does everyone else.
In fact, it’s now down to that dangerous time when it seems hard to imagine anyone else being the 2009 Cup champion.
How the heck does this guy do it? Perhaps as Johnson continues to mark his place in history, some of his methods are becoming clearer.
One of the keys to Johnson’s success is his remarkable ability to “put the blinders on” – a trait he shares with other elite athletes and one that he has all but perfected.
It means tuning everything else out – not getting too high or too low; not reading this magazine or Web sites or watching NASCAR news on TV; shutting everything out and focusing solely on his job.
“When you’re doing well, you’re in a rhythm, things are great, [and] you get a little confident and you lose,” he said. “Whatever it is – if you’re shooting hoops, if you’re swinging a golf club – it’s just gone.
“I’ve learned over time in a race car that the same thing can happen. I need to just worry about doing my job and not let the emotions affect my effort and my focus.”
Johnson isn’t the only one who does this. He’s spread the gospel to individual crew members on the No. 48 team, which has gradually turned the entire group into a winning machine.
“If it’s a tire changer, all he needs to be thinking about is five lug nuts on, five lug nuts off,” Johnson said. “[The] jackman needs to think of his steps, where he’s placing the jack.
“It is for us all to stay in our worlds and focused on our jobs, and we need to go out and execute.”
And boy, do they ever, building an air of invincibility along the way. Driver, crew chief and crew are so in tune with the task at hand and able to block out all the noise and distractions, they are continually able to perform at a high level in situations where others fail.
There’s no choke in this team.
That’s why head games won’t work with Johnson. There was much talk at Martinsville of how Johnson’s competitors should try to “rattle his cage,” as Dale Earnhardt would have perhaps done.
But Johnson is so zoned in, it’s difficult to imagine him letting anything deter him from his mission.
So although the other drivers keep insisting the Chase is not over (Kurt Busch called it “cute” that people were handing Johnson the title already), and though Johnson himself refuses to look past the next race, there seems little hope for the ABJ fans.
If the racing gods don’t stop Johnson with a stroke of horrible luck at Talladega, Johnson could ultimately raise the trophy before we even get to Homestead.
Can he be beaten?
“The way he’s running, you’ve probably got to win the next five races and he’s got to have some bad luck,” Montoya said.
Unfortunately, Montoya failed to realize there are only four races left.
