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CUP: Will A Race Break Out After All?
Written by: Tom Jensen   
11/09/2009
Fort Worth, TX
 
History strongly suggests that despite his Texas stumble on Sunday, Jimmie Johnson still will go on to win his fourth consecutive NASCAR Sprint Cup championship.
After Jimmie Johnson’s lap 3 crash and subsequent 38th place finish Sunday, Mark Martin is only 73 points behind in the Championship Chase. (Photo: LAT Photographic) » More Photos

Ever since NASCAR adopted its Chase for the Sprint Cup format in 2004, the driver leading the points after eight of the 10 Chase races went on to capture the championship that season.

Of course, Johnson was the driver who in the three previous editions of the Chase was leading after eight races and did go on to claim the title each time. And Johnson’s margin of 73 points over his Hendrick Motorsports teammate Mark Martin ought to be pretty much unassailable with only races at Phoenix International Raceway and Homestead-Miami Speedway still on the schedule.

But if Martin wants some inspiration about closing the gap, he only needs to go back to 1992. That’s when Alan Kulwicki was 85 points in back of Bill Elliott and 15 behind Davey Allison with two races to go and went on to claim the championship in the final race of the season at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

Kulwicki, an independent owner/driver, won the title at Atlanta by leading just one lap more than Elliott did, thus picking up five bonus points for leading the most laps in the race. Had Elliott led the most laps in the finale, he would have claimed the title.

As it was, that race has gone down in history as one of NASCAR’s greatest, in part because of the tactical battle between Kulwicki and Elliott as the laps wound down, and in part because it was both the last Sprint Cup start of Richard Petty’s remarkable career and the first of Jeff Gordon’s.

If — and it’s a huge “if” — Martin is somehow able to miraculously rally and pull himself out of a hole that was 184 points heading into last Sunday’s race at Texas and go to defeat the dominant Johnson to win his first title, it will be an upset every bit the level of Kulwicki’s defeat of Elliott and Allison in 1992, if not more so.

And it would one of
the biggest stories in NASCAR history, given that Martin had publicly renounced ever chasing a championship again after four runner-up finishes between 1990 and 2002. In fact, Martin had cut back to a part-time schedule before being lured back into the full Sprint Cup Series calendar by team owner Rick Hendrick.

Of course, if Johnson holds on, he will become the first Sprint Cup driver in history to win a fourth consecutive championship, and join Petty, the late Dale Earnhardt and Gordon as the only drivers with four or more championships. And Johnson is as eager to see how it plays out as everyone else is.

“Luckily we have a big points lead,” he said after crashing on Lap 3 and finishing 38th at Texas Motor Speedway on Sunday. “All along we've been trying to tell everybody this thing is far from over, what our mindset has been. Luckily we've raced for every point throughout this Chase. We still have a decent points lead right now.”

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



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