The 48 is All gassed up and ready to go All the moaning about Jimmie's good fortune at Talladega reminds Power Rankings author Mark Aumann of an Elvis Presley song: "Don't be cruel to a car that's fueled." lol
Oh yeah, he ran a real good race at Talladega - - if you call running in the back of the pack so he didn't get his precious little race car dented, good, then he was simply marvelous !!! Then when it was time to go he got boxed in - - - I loved it, can you tell??? REAL MEN/CHAMPIONS RACE HARD - - - HARD AND UP FRONT - - not running in the back of the pack like a little whimp.
Gee He kept his winning points lead didnt he ?
the Jimmie Johnson years
Jimmie Johnson will probably make stock-car history this month by winning a fourth consecutive championship, but his coronation will be the culmination of an anticlimactic Nascar Sprint Cup Series season.
Johnson has promised that he will race hard in the last three races, even though he does not need to push it.
Johnson leads Mark Martin, the driver in second place, by 184 points going into Sunday’s race at Texas Motor Speedway. If Martin wins the final three races and accumulates all 585 possible points, Johnson would need to finish 10th in each of those races to win an unprecedented fourth straight Cup points title. “Finishing 10th isn’t as easy as it sounds,” Johnson said in a teleconference last Tuesday.
Johnson has made it look easy. He has 22 top-10 finishes in 33 races this year. He has finished in the top 10 in all seven Chase for the Sprint Cup races and has won three. He finished second in April at Texas Motor Speedway and fourth two weeks later at Phoenix, which hosts its second race of the season next weekend.
Johnson has turned the Chase into a dud, spoiling several juicy story lines before they had much of a chance to develop. The 50-year-old Martin took a full-time ride this year with Hendrick Motorsports, Johnson’s team, and won four races during the regular season to enter the Chase with the points lead. Juan Pablo Montoya, the 2000 Indianapolis 500 winner and a former Formula One driver, was in contention until Johnson stormed to a commanding points lead with back-to-back victories in mid-October.
“I was one of those like many others from the outside looking in, looking at Jimmie Johnson making it look easy, thinking he was a lucky guy that drove for a great race team,” Martin said Friday at a news conference in Fort Worth. “I’m taking that back now. I’ve seen different, and I’m one of the guys that is standing up saying, ‘Hey, he’s not getting enough credit.’ ”
Martin has won only once in the last 15 races and has not won two races in a row this season, let alone three. It is possible, even probable, that Johnson will carry an insurmountable lead — 161 points or more — into the final race of the season Nov. 21 in Homestead, Fla. That has never happened in the six-year history of the Chase.
Johnson’s margin of victory will probably be the largest since the Chase was devised in 2004 to make the end of the season more interesting. Johnson won the last three titles by 56, 77 and 69 points; no driver has won the title by 100 points or more.
Johnson has been virtually untouchable. His crew chief, Chad Knaus, has given him fast cars to drive and has made shrewd pit calls.
Last Sunday at Talladega, Knaus told Johnson to make a quick pit stop for gas after Ryan Newman was involved in a spectacular accident that stopped the race for 13 minutes.
Johnson, who had been content to run in the middle of the pack for most of an otherwise dull afternoon, passed more than 15 cars when the race was restarted.
He finished sixth at a track that is far from his strongest and gained 66 points on Martin, who flipped across the track at the end of the race, finishing 28th.
“I’m really just treating these races as if they were other races,” Johnson said Tuesday. “I know it sounds stupid and corny and almost predictable, but it’s the truth. I mean, the way we have prepared to this point has led to the points lead that we have and the race wins that we’ve accumulated over the year, and we need to do more of the same.”
Johnson, pleasant and hardly controversial, often sounds like another Californian born in 1975 who came to dominate another sport: Tiger Woods. Johnson demands a lot of himself, but he has continued to surpass his own expectations.
Nascar, hit hard by the recession, does not seem to need a history-maker as much as it needs tight packs of fast cars to sell the sport. Last Sunday’s race at Talladega drew an estimated 127,500 fans — 14,500 fewer than in April and 17,500 fewer than the fall race in 2008.
The fans who came were incensed by the single-file parade for most of the afternoon. Nascar’s president, Mike Helton, told the drivers before the race to refrain from bump drafting, an aggressive tactic that can help cars at Talladega, where restrictor plates are mandated to slow the cars down and spectacular crashes have become the norm.
“Everybody was minding their manners and being responsible up until we could see the checkered flag essentially, and that’s when things started to get crazy and we crashed,” Johnson said.
But Johnson avoided trouble, once again. He is ruffling the intent of the refined points system, which is supposed to keep the Chase close until the last race.
The 12 drivers who qualify for the Chase start with 5,000 points, and each is given 10 bonus points for each race they had won entering the Chase. Johnson has never failed to qualify for a Chase and has never finished lower than fifth in six previous seasons as a driver.
Besides leading in points, Johnson has won more races (6) and more money ($6,725,006) this year than any other driver. He has, like Woods, established a dynasty.
Nascar could come up with yet another way to level the playing field — it always does. Until then, Johnson remains far enough ahead of the pack that he does not need to stamp the gas pedal, even though he said he would.
3 cheers for NASCAEEEQueen . Tell it like it is. Pussy ran at the back sign of a real champ To be a real champ you need to be up front with the real men.
posted by moe67
24 days ago
Ya right Moe, he just wanted to see what it was like to run with the Fords for a change :^)
Your entitled to your opinion . I'm entitled to mine . If you want to be a champ then run up front or at lest try .
posted by moe67
23 days ago
HERE KITTY KITTY....
Jimmie Johnson ready to take flight at Phoenix
After a wreck and disappointing 38th-place finish last Sunday at Texas Motor Speedway, Jimmie Johnson and his entire No. 48 team have got to be breathing a sigh of relief as they head for Phoenix this weekend because Johnson's statistics at Phoenix International Raceway in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series are hard to ignore.
The three-time and defending Cup champion has three victories at the 1-mile track, the most of any active driver. What is equally impressive is his average finish of 5.4 at PIR.
Of all the tracks that Cup competes on, Phoenix is Johnson's second best when considering average finish, trailing only Martinsville Speedway, where he sports an average finish of 5.1.
In just 12 starts at Phoenix, Johnson has amassed seven top-five and 10 top-10 finishes. Teammate Mark Martin, who enters this weekend’s race trailing Johnson by 73 points in the Chase For The Sprint Cup, sports numbers that may even be a little better – two wins, 10 top-fives and 16 top-10s - but Martin has made 13 more starts at Phoenix than Johnson.
Johnson’s strong history at Phoenix has to give the team reason to hope for a better finish this time out.
not at all if I remember think a FORD won that race. so he didn't run with a FORD SORRY
posted by moe67
20 days ago
