Jimmie Johnson says championship race is wide open

By Rea White - Associate Editor
Saturday, September 06, 2008
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Rusty Jarrett
Getty Images for NASCAR

RICHMOND, Va. – When Jimmie Johnson looks over his Hendrick Motorsports team, he sees a group that is peaking at the right time. After a season when the two-time NASCAR Cup champion and crew chief Chad Knaus have uncharacteristically struggled, they seem to be hitting on all cylinders once more.
 
Johnson won last weekend in California, his third victory of the year. He says that, with the Chase For The Sprint Cup just a week away, this is the perfect time to be gaining strength in the series. Johnson is already locked into the field for the 10-race, title-determining segment of the season. He has 30 bonus points for when the Chase begins, a performance that will keep him
third, seeded behind Joe Gibbs Racing's Kyle Busch (who has eight wins) and Roush Fenway Racing's Carl Edwards (who has six wins but only 50 bonus points after forfeiting 10 as part of a penalty).

Johnson says this is the perfect time for his team to be picking up steam. Last year, he won four Chase races on the way to the title.
 
"This is the first year we got off to a slow start," he said. "We typically have a slow middle and then finish up strong. I wish I knew why
that trend works like it does. We’ve worked as hard as we could since the banquet last year and we were just off. We were working in the wrong areas and it seems like now we’re running out of things to mess with and on to the right track and finding a lot of speed.”
 
Meanwhile, Busch and Edwards have combined for 14 wins. Still, that doesn't necessarily mean a team needs to be perfect in the Chase to contend with them, nor does it signal that they are the only drivers in contention for the title. Johnson says that anything is possible in the 10-race Chase.

“It just depends on the races," he said. "Really, it’s going to depend on the first four or five weeks and how that goes. In ’06 when we won the championship, we were convinced that you had to finish in the top 10 every week in order to win the championship and I left Talladega 180-something points out of the lead and thought I was done, and still came back and won. It was ... weird and a lot of guys had bad luck. Last year, you look at the average [finish] it took to win it and it was like a 4.6 or 4.8 to win the championship. So you just don’t know."

Therefore, any team in the Chase has the potential to win the title. As he looks over the potential field, Johnson doesn't rule out anyone as a contender.

"You’d be foolish to count out anyone in the top 12 with the caliber of race teams you have and the drivers," he said. "You can have favorites and you certainly look at the No. 18 [of Busch] and the No. 99 [of Edwards] and put them up there. I think we’d be third out of those guys, out of everybody in the Chase. But at the same time, the Chase is a whole different world and you don’t know how people are going to react to pressure.

"You don’t know what that average is going to be. You have a couple of wrecks where the top guys get taken out, you look at Talladega and Martinsville and some of these places where bad stuff can happen, it can take a [12th-place average finish] to win this thing. You just don’t know until you get going.”

Mentioned Drivers: Jimmie Johnson

Comments

2 responses to "Jimmie Johnson says championship race is wide open". Post a Comment.
  1. 1
    Bob Anderson said:
    Sep 26, 2008 at 12:25 PM

    Jimmie will win his third championship! it will be very close with Carl Edwards in second place. Jr. could come in third if he would put a little more into it. The rest of the field is anyones guess!!!!!!!!!

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  2. 2
    Bob Anderson said:
    Sep 26, 2008 at 12:28 PM

    Jimmie johnson is the man to beat if they can, and I don't think so!!!!!!!!! Go Jimmie Go

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2009 Sprint Cup Race for the Chase Standings

Driver Standings after the AMP Energy 500

1 Jimmie Johnson 6248
2 Mark Martin -184
3 Jeff Gordon -192
4 Juan Pablo Montoya -239
5 Tony Stewart -279
6 Kurt Busch -312
7 Greg Biffle -340
8 Ryan Newman -402
9 Kasey Kahne -414
10 Carl Edwards -437
11 Denny Hamlin -448
12 Brian Vickers -556

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