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RICHMOND, VA. - It's only September, but Saturday night should feel like Christmas to defending Nextel Cup champion Jimmie Johnson.
When the Chevy Rock & Roll 400 at Richmond International Raceway is finished, Johnson will have his fat deficit in the standings forgiven for the start of the Chase for the Championship next weekend at New Hampshire.
He's currently sixth in the points, 417 points behind leader and teammate Jeff Gordon. But since the Chase will be seeded according to how many races each of the 12 qualifiers has won, Johnson will start the 10-race championship no worse than tied for first.
And because the No. 48 team is the best combination of team, driver and car, many will see Johnson as a slight favorite against Gordon and Tony Stewart to win his second championship.
"The whole 48 team has just been so strong since its inception in 2002," said Chad Knaus, Johnson's highly regarded crew chief. "When we rolled out, I was very proud of the way Jimmie was able to drive the race car. The team just jelled and it has continued to get bigger, and stronger."
Johnson's season hasn't gone without difficulty. After winning four of the first 10 races and getting a third-place finish at Darlington in the 11th race, Johnson, of El Cajon, Calif., had a nine-race stretch in which he had three crashes and only one top-five finish. He fell as far as ninth in the points, although he was never in serious jeopardy of missing the Chase.
The slump coincided with Knaus' six-race suspension for submitting an illegal car for inspection at Sonoma, Calif. Knaus is back, and Johnson won Sunday night's Sharp Aquos 500 at California for his first victory in four months.
"Certainly I was concerned," Johnson said about his tough stretch. "We had great race cars and had bad luck and lost a lot of ground. And it's easy to have a bad race car and just not run well the following week. So if you get four or five bad races in a row, you can lose a lot of ground, and that's where I was nervous."
Johnson points out that his team ran better during the summer than some of his results showed.
"I think of Dover … Chicago, where we were really running good and up front and had problems," he said. "Historically we get off to a great start, have a slow summer and finish up strong, and it looks like for whatever reason, our cycle is coming back."
In his last five races, Johnson finished fifth at Pocono, third at Watkins Glen and Michigan, 21st at Bristol and first at California. His victory at California was the 28th of his career, tying him with Rex White for 21st on the NASCAR career list.
Next up is Saturday night's final regular-season race at Richmond, where Johnson won in May. He'll have the same car - Chassis No. 424 - and since points mean nothing at this point for drivers who've clinched Chase berths, he can go all out for a win.
Of course everybody else in the race - except for 11th place Kurt Busch and 12th place Kevin Harvick, who have to protect big points leads against Dale Earnhardt Jr. - will be thinking about winning as well.
Richmond is a Car of Tomorrow race, and while Johnson and his Hendrick Motorsports teammates had an advantage with the new car early in the year, other teams have been catching up.
"There are certainly a lot of other teams that have closed the gap," Johnson said. "That's really by NASCAR's design. I think we did a very good job of sorting out our cars before the season started. But as the year went on, we really haven't had anywhere else to go and we're kind of topped out, and the teams below us have been catching up."
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