Jimmie Johnson runs roughshod over field at Phoenix to close in on fourth straight Cup crown
On a neon-filled Saturday night in Las Vegas, a dominant boxer by the name of Manny Pacquiao pummeled his opponent in the depths of a flashy casino.
The following afternoon, just 285 miles to the southeast, a race-car driver named Jimmie Johnson did the same thing to his competition on the track.
Barring a tremendous stroke of misfortune in the final Sprint Cup Series race of the season, Johnson will end the year in Pacquiao-like fashion – in Las Vegas, holding up the hardware to the sound of cheers.
Homestead-Miami Speedway now seems only to be a brief detour on the road to the season-ending awards banquet in Las Vegas, with Johnson just 400 miles away from a seat at the head table for a record-setting fourth consecutive season.
Johnson proved that in style at Phoenix International Raceway, knocking out the field by leading 238 of 312 laps and winning at the 1-mile desert oval for the fourth time in the last five races.
The driver nicknamed “Superman” by his teammate Mark Martin now leads Martin by 108 points, meaning Johnson needs just a 25th-place finish at Homestead to win a fourth straight Cup championship.
There was little doubt that Phoenix would host another day of the Jimmie Johnson Show, and Johnson left little hope for Martin to catch him.
“We just put a butt-kicking on everybody today,” Johnson said, chuckling.
It was a scene that has become so familiar to both NASCAR fans and Johnson’s competitors: Johnson in victory lane yet again, holding up a bottle of Gatorade, pumping his fist as everyone else justifies being happy about their own finish.
“It was a great run, a great team effort and a really great race car,” a seemingly cheerful Martin said after finishing fourth. “It was a really good run. We were right there.”
Pressed on his thoughts of the championship, Martin indicated – as usual – that he could live without it.
“I’m not worried about it,” he said. “We’ve talked about this a million times. We had a great race today. I’m proud of what we did.”
And really, that seems to be all Johnson’s competitors can hope for. No matter if Johnson takes an uppercut to the chin – as he did at Texas, when a stunning wreck on lap 3 allowed Martin to close within 73 points of the lead – he and his team seem to rally back.
“Any time that Jimmie is down is not usually because of performance, it’s usually because of an incident like you had [at Texas],” third-place finisher Denny Hamlin said.
“There was no doubt in my mind they were going to come this week and make a statement. Obviously, leading all the laps pretty much and winning the race sends a statement out there that he is the best, that they’re not going to be denied this year.”
Perhaps more than anything, Johnson and crew chief Chad Knaus were thrilled by how the No. 48 team responded to some rare Chase adversity. Johnson has been used to winning – he’s done so 47 times since he entered the sport, seven times this year and four times in the 2009 Chase.
But rarely has he had a setback that requires a response or rally – especially in the Chase, where he went more than three years between finishes outside the top 15 before the Texas wreck.
So if this was the response to taking one on the chin, consider it a championship-winning effort. Pacquiao – who Johnson will succeed as the star of the HBO series “24/7” next winter – would be proud.
“It would have been easy for us to come in here with our tails between our legs, really bow out, try to pull a conservative race, hang out, finish right behind [Martin], whatever the situation may have been,” Knaus said. “We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to come in here confident and go after it and attack.”
“I’m very proud of the fact we looked each other in the eyes, knew what we had to do, and delivered,” Johnson said. “It wasn’t easy. You know, there was a lot of pressure on us to do this. All week long, thinking about this race, wondering if we could come back and step up like we did today, there were just a lot of thoughts that go through the brain. I’m very, very proud of how we delivered and rose to the occasion.”
On the other hand, Johnson is well aware that though the fans and media may be ready to hand him the championship, it still must be earned on the track. And though it sounds silly to say “Anything can happen,” the Texas race showed that it actually can.
“You saw last week, right?” he said.
But in reality, Martin and his team have to not only run well but hope their teammate somehow meets misfortune.
“He’s got to finish worse than 25th – that makes that pretty cut and dried,” Martin’s crew chief, Alan Gustafson, said. “We have to win it for that scenario to play out, so we’ll just focus on doing that and going down there to Homestead and enjoy it.”
When Johnson has you up against the ropes, what else can you do?
