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JENSEN: One For The Ages
Written by: Tom Jensen   
11/23/2009
Homestead, FL
 
Jimmie Johnson, Chad Knaus and the No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports team made their historic run official Sunday night at Homestead-Miami Speedway, where Johnson clinched his record fourth consecutive NASCAR Sprint Cup championship.
SPEEDtv.com's Editor-in-Chief Tom Jensen. (Image: SPEED) ยป More Photos

Only Richard Petty and the late Dale Earnhardt have earned more Cup titles than Johnson, who now truly has to be mentioned in the same breath with those NASCAR legends.

Even Johnson, who has consistently tried to avoid questions about his own legacy, finally owned up to the fact that what he and his team accomplished this year truly was something special.

“You know, the fact that nobody has done this, I think it puts me near the top,” Johnson said Sunday night. “I certainly look at the seven championships by both Earnhardt and Petty, their race wins, their being in the sport for the number of years and all that they've done, those two guys are kind of at a draw at the top. Hopefully my stats and win totals and championship totals can rival theirs’. But it puts us up there, it really does. And the cool thing is we're not done yet. We've got a lot of racing left ahead of us. So hopefully we can improve on that.”

And that’s the scary thing. At the ripe old age of 34, Johnson is just now starting to reach the age that used to be considered a driver’s prime. It’s hard to look at him and that team and not think they have more championships ahead.

Asked if he could reach or even surpass the total of seven set by Petty and Earnhardt, Johnson replied, “I don't know if we'll win another championship. I have no idea what next year will bring and what the challenges will bring as the years go by. There's just no guarantees on that. I feel in my heart we'll be competitive. But at some point in time we won't be that team. We're going to do everything we can to make sure we are that team. But you just never know what the future holds.

“Yes, I would love to win seven, eight championships, and me saying that, it's like (Jeff) Gordon saying he wants to win seven or eight. Of course we want to do that. But is it a realistic thing at this point in time? The level of competition we have in the sport, I don't know. But we're sure as hell going to try.”

Crew chief Knaus, one of the most intense people ever in a sport full of intense people, hinted that
even he can’t keep up this pace indefinitely.

“I don't know, man,” he said when asked about the future. “I don't know what I'm going to do when I grow up. I hope I never have to grow up. I love my job. I can't be a crew chief forever. I'll be honest, I can't run at this pace for 10 more years. It's impossible. … We'll just have to see. I always said I was going to open a scuba shop in the Caribbean, so we might do that.”

If you asked a lot of the other teams in the garage, they’d probably pitch in to help Knaus do just that.

But for now, the No. 48 express is just going to keep rolling, and that’s exactly the way the newly minted four-time champ wants it.

“Watching the fans over the last two years, the respect they've had for this team, myself, the cheers when I got out of the car tonight, the place was going nuts,” said Johnson. “I really, really appreciate our fans and our sport and know what it means inside our sport, and I think over the next few days I'll do a better of job of understanding where it fits within sports. Four in a row, it doesn't matter if you're racing bathtubs or go karts or playing baseball, football. It's tough to do, and I'm awfully proud of it.”

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

The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEEDtv.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or Speed Channel
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