Chad Knaus will try to lead the Lowes No.48 team to the fourth consecutive NASCAR Sprint Cup championship this weekend at Homestead-Miami. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

And that could be very bad news for the competition.

If Johnson is able to nail down his fourth consecutive Sprint Cup championship this weekend at Homestead-Miami Speedway, then he, Knaus and the rest of the team will aim squarely at reaching and then surpassing the record of seven Sprint Cup championships set by Richard Petty and the late Dale Earnhardt.

“We've been in a position to where we've been able to battle for the championship since 2002,” said Knaus. “So I would like to say that we could be in that position. But you don't know. The competition level is so high that you can't — you don't know what you're going to do from one week to the next. It's so difficult to predetermine what's going to happen. It wasn't that long ago you would say, okay, we can realistically run Top 10 every week, barring a mechanical issue or what have you. Now you can't realistically say you're going to run Top 20 every week because the competition is so tough.”

Still, they’re going to go for it.

“I know that Jimmie has got the talent. I know that we've got the talent here at Hendrick Motorsports to make that happen, and we know Mr. Hendrick likes shiny things,” said Knaus. “If we can keep going and get him more trophies, he's just going to be happier, and Alan (Gustafson, Mark Martin's crew chief) is going to try to do the same thing. That's just kind of the way it is. We're going to give it everything we've got and see where it shakes out, and hopefully we're here six, seven years from now doing the same thing.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief for SPEEDtv.com, the former Executive Editor of NASCAR Scene and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. He is the author of ?Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of SPEED,? and has appeared on television and radio shows to discuss NASCAR racing. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association. Jensen is the 1997 National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year and has won numerous national and state awards for news reporting, columns and feature writing. The Answer Man is back at SPEEDtv.com. Tom Jensen answers your questions during every race week and looks forward to hearing from you - please e-mail it to