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HEMBREE: Round One To Bad Brad
For at least one Chase week, Brad Keselowski KOs Jimmie Johnson…
Mike Hembree  |  Posted September 17, 2012   Joliet, IL
Brad Keselowski, driver of the No. 2 Miller Lite Dodge, celebrates after winning the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series GEICO 400 at Chicagoland Speedway. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
It’s good to be the king.

But who’s king? Is it Brad Keselowski, the new Chase point man? Is it Jimmie Johnson, leader of a zillion laps Sunday but second on the finish grid? Is it someone else?

The answer is that no one knows.

The flow of Sunday’s GEICO 400 at Chicagoland Speedway indicated that Johnson, winner of five of the past six championships, would leave the Midwest and move on to the Northeast for Race Two with the elusive monkey named Momentum firmly in his grasp.

Johnson led 172 of the race’s first 228 laps and looked suspiciously like Superman, the same character he’s played over these championship runs in several other seasons.

The logical finish would have placed Johnson several seconds in front of second place, he would have grabbed the point lead from Denny Hamlin and the march toward a sixth championship would have begun.

But Brad Keselowski – Brash Brad, Bad Brad, that guy – threw a Mopar wrench into the plan. Using a solid late-race pit stop and a smooth, barely-on-the-edge-of-legal return to the race track, Keselowski stole the race from Johnson and rolled home in a blaze of Miller blue and gold.

He’s not yet the king, but a prince’s clothing might fit Keselowski for at least a few weeks. There’s little question that, entering New Hampshire Motor Speedway for the next round in a long ride to Homestead, he is carrying the big stick.

That could turn easily on the flat one-mile at Loudon, but Keselowski, a fighter, seems to be the sort who won’t give up the high ground without a skirmish. The suspicion isn’t that he’s one and done.

“I'm going to focus on the next nine, and I know everybody on my team is going to do that,” Keselowski said. “It's great to get to the points lead, but we've got so much racing left, and it would be a disservice to today's accomplishments to allow our focus to get off of tomorrow's workload.”

Keselowski refused to be drawn into a media pingpong match with Johnson. He and his team won a race Sunday in a smart style that typically has been associated with Johnson and his crew chief, Chad Knaus. But Keselowski was careful not to wander into talking about such territorial matters.

No need to irritate the bear.

This is not to suggest that the Chase race is suddenly between these two drivers. Everyone’s still in it, even though the numbers already look dark for a few.

For at least the beginnings, however, it’s Miller time.

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 30 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.
The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED
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