By Jenna Fryer
The Associated Press
Charlotte, N.C. – Jimmie Johnson knows what it’s like to lose a championship, falling just short of the Nextel Cup title last season. Now that he’s back on top of the points standings, Johnson will try to rely on his past failure to prevent it from happening again.
“We lost last year by eight points, and we had some troubles at the start of the Chase,” Johnson said. “This year, hopefully, we’ll make the right decisions and not have any weird things happen to us, and I won’t make any mistakes on the racetrack and stay clean throughout.”
Johnson ended a 15-race drought by winning at Dover (Del.) last weekend, a victory that rocketed him five spots in the standings and back atop the leaderboard. Johnson spent 16 weeks as the points leader this season, only to slip to a season-low sixth after a late-summer swoon.
The same thing happened to Johnson last season, when he led the points for eight weeks only to falter just as the 10-race Chase for the championship began. He dropped as low as ninth in the standings, then won four of the next five races to claw his way back into contention.
He had a legitimate shot at the title in the season finale, only to come up just short to Nextel Cup champion Kurt Busch.
So when his Hendrick Motorsports team again hit a slump this season, it seemed like another ill-timed collapse for Johnson.
“You never want to nose-over or lose momentum, but everybody knows that it happens at some point in time,” Johnson said. “For our team, it’s usually around August or a little before that, and then we recover and get back where we need to be.”
His first task will be making it out of Sunday’s race at Talladega Superspeedway unscathed. He has had difficulty doing so in the past, falling victim to everything from the typical restrictor-plate wreck to faulty parts and freak accidents.
In 2002, Johnson headed into Talladega on top of the points standings for the first time in his career. His stay there was short, though, because Mark Martin crashed into him on the prerace parade lap as the two drivers attempted to warm their tires.
It forced Johnson to pit road for repairs before the race even started and played a part in his 37th-place finish that day.
“Talladega is a wild-card event,” he said. “We’re just going to go out there and try to stay out of trouble.”
