CHARLOTTE, N.C. — It’s easy for outsiders to cross Jimmie Johnson off the list of title contenders. They don’t work side by side with the five-time defending NASCAR champion every week, and have no idea just how hard it is to beat him.
It’s a whole different story, though, when those inside the NASCAR garage publicly dismiss him the way rival team owner Jack Roush did two weeks ago at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
“You can’t expect to get a mulligan,” Roush said after Johnson’s 34th-place finish at Charlotte.
“You’ll be very lucky if somebody will give you a chance to make up the whole race. I thought that Jimmie Johnson would be a factor in it and he’s definitely going to have to stand in line and wait for the other folks in the top five to have problems for him to get back in it. He won’t race his way back in it. He won’t finish high enough above the top four or five cars to beat them on the racetrack. He’ll have to wait for them to have trouble I think.”
Johnson has indeed taken a tumble since his victory three races ago at Kansas pushed him to third in the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship standings. He had a hard wreck at Charlotte that cost him five spots in the standings, but as he headed to Talladega Superspeedway, where he had wonin the spring, it was conceivable that he’d make up some ground.
Instead, Johnson and Hendrick Motorsports teammate Dale Earnhardt Jr. waited too long to make their move through the field, and Johnson finished 26th.
He’s now ranked seventh in the standings, 50 points behind leader Carl Edwards, with four races remaining in the Chase.
“We just keep grinding them out,” Johnson said after Talladega. “We’ll just keep fighting. Every position counts. Every spot counts.And I want to finish as high as I can in the points. If it isn’t the championship, I want to finish as high as I can possibly finish. So we’re going to keep fighting hard.”
This year has been below average by Johnson’s standards, and with just one victory in the “regular season” people were ready to write him off after a disappointing run at New Hampshire in Round 2 of the Chase.
Those same people sure looked silly a week later when a second-place finish at Dover moved him up five spots in the standings to fifth. Then his victory at Kansas had the points lead well within reach.
Just like that, it slipped through his fingers, and his entire comeback came undone.
But his past three weeks should be evidence enough that it can all change in the blink of an eye.
Sports, Pages 22 on 10/27/2011