Inside track

How hard is it to repeat as Nextel Cup champion in this era of stampede competition and crapshoot playoffs?

“Go to Vegas,” said Tony Stewart, who won the NASCAR title in 2005 but missed the Chase last year. “Let them tell you what the odds are of spinning a ball on a roulette wheel and hitting 00, and it coming up again the next time.”

There hasn’t been a repeat champion since Jeff Gordon in 1998, and that was under the old, season-long points system with no “Chase for the Cup.”

The Chase format alone “makes it two or three times harder to win [the championship],” said Rick Hendrick, the last team owner to send a driver to consecutive titles -- and the one with a chance to do it this year.

But 2006 champion Jimmie Johnson has the best shot any driver could have at repeating under current conditions, say Hendrick and Gordon, who co-own Johnson’s branch of the Hendrick Motorsports empire.

In fact, Hendrick rates Johnson’s chances as “awfully good.”

That’s because, in Stewart’s roulette analogy, Johnson and crew chief Chad Knaus have hit numbers adjacent to 00 all five seasons they’ve been in the Cup series.

That is, they’ve been contenders every time. The ball finally rolled an extra millimeter for them last year. So it’s entirely possible to win again this year, as close as they come every year.

“Just to think back, we’ve led the points all five years and been in contention,” said Johnson, risen from humble beginnings in the Southern California desert, the son of a heavy-equipment operator and a school bus driver. “So it’s been a magical thing here.”

All three years of the Chase, Johnson has started the final race at Homestead-Miami with a shot at the title. In 2004, he won four of the last six races and fell only eight points short of Kurt Busch, who benefited from a NASCAR miracle in the finale. A wheel came off Busch’s car in the last split second at which he could duck into the pits and avoid a disastrous time loss.

“We definitely had the eight-point one slip away,” Johnson said. And counting other near misses in his five years, “I think there could have been two or three [championships] in there, which is sort of amazing.”

Said Hendrick: “I feel like the chemistry is as good with Chad and Jimmie right now as it was with Ray [Evernham] and Jeff when they did ‘em back to back.”

But the scramble of the Chase isn’t the only obstacle.

“Back then we didn’t have four top contenders,” said Hendrick, picking his four top threats to a Johnson repeat:

* Stewart, the 2002 and 2005 champion, in Joe Gibbs Racing Chevrolets.

* Matt Kenseth, 2003 champion and 2006 runner-up to Johnson, in Roush Fenway Racing Fords.

* Kasey Kahne, winner of six races last season, most of any driver on the tour, in Dodges fielded by Evernham, now a team owner.

* And the maestro himself, four-time champion Gordon, still Hendrick’s senior driver.

Upstart Toyota, for all its expenditures and technology, is just too new on the learning curve to be any threat for the championship, Hendrick figures.

Stewart, Kenseth and Kahne -- “those are the cars I’m worried about,” Hendrick said. “I’ll worry about Toyota when the time comes.”

Despite the threats, “We’re better than we were a year ago,” Hendrick said. “We’ve learned a lot in the off-season. So hopefully we’ll be right there.

“And I’m comfortable that the [Johnson-Knaus] team couldn’t be in any better position than they are right now to repeat.”

At the moment, though, Johnson is playing catch-up, having finished 39th Sunday in the season-opening Daytona 500 after touching off a multi-car accident 27 laps from the finish.

One unknown for all the top teams is the Car of Tomorrow, the revolutionary NASCAR design that will be mandated for 16 of the 36 Cup races this year, as a three-season phase-in begins.

“We’d better not miss a beat” with the COT, said the ever-intense Knaus in his normal staccato speech. “As many times as we race that car this year, we’re gonna have to be spot-on with that car when we unload it at Bristol [Tenn., for the first COT race on March 25].”

But Johnson has confidence in his rapid-fire crew chief and the Hendrick organization, whose next Cup win will be its 150th.

“Historically, if you look at Hendrick Motorsports and especially the 48 team, when new rules come along we adjust fast,” Johnson said. “We usually figure things out fast. I’m not saying we’ll be the best [with the COT], but I am encouraged because I know with this new challenge we’ll be on the front side of the learning curve.”

The burdens a champion carries throughout the next season -- a deluge of additional media attention, an intensified schedule of sponsor- and NASCAR-related public appearances, and myriad other distractions -- can further complicate any shot at repeating.

“Personality has a lot to do with it,” Gordon said. “Jimmie’s got a well-balanced personality: He’s calm, he’s down to earth. And he’s surrounded by good people, like I was when I came into the sport.

“He can maintain, and do a good job with all the expectations and responsibilities.”

Plus, the rolling of the roulette ball an extra millimeter may constitute a corner turned permanently for the No. 48 team, Gordon and Hendrick believe.

In the first four races of last year’s Chase, the 48 team fell behind with bad luck and wrecks. Then it rampaged relentlessly forward, notching a win and four second-place finishes in the next five races of the Chase.

“The way they handled the pressure at the end of the year, the way they handled the problems during the Chase and got stronger, is an indication that they don’t get rattled, and they step up,” Hendrick said.

“Their team has been so consistent over the years, and I’ve seen them get to where -- this time, had they not won the championship, it was going to take so much wind out of them that I was concerned,” Gordon said.

“But now they’ve won it. Now my only concern is that they’re the guys I’ve got to beat for the championship.”

After four near misses, “we got the job done, so that’s helped bring some confidence,” Johnson said. “We’ve always believed in our system, but now we have a proven system for winning the championship. So we look back at our finishes and how we’ve performed and we say, ‘These tracks were tough on us. What are we going to do to get better?’ ”

Going into the Homestead-Miami finale in November, with nothing but heartbreak in his experience there, Johnson spoke more longingly than ever about how “I’ve always wanted to be a champion at this level.”

So now, has it felt as good as he’d always thought it would?

“It has,” he said, before hesitating. “But it’s a lot like a race win. When I won my first race, it was the ultimate feeling at that point in time. But two days later you wake up and you’re like, ‘All right, guys, we gotta go do it again.’ This is similar to that.

“It’s been a great off-season, but you gotta go do it again.”

Ed Hinton covers auto racing for Tribune newspapers.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Taking stock

Jimmie Johnson’s NASCAR statistics

*--* Year/ Races Wins Poles Top 5 Top 10 DNF Avg. Avg. Winnings Finish Start 2001 3 0 0 0 0 1 31.0 22.0 $122,320 2002 36 3 5 6 21 3 13.5 14.3 $2,847,702 2003 36 3 2 14 20 3 11.4 12.3 $5,517,850 2004 36 8 3 20 23 7 12.1 10.5 $5,692,624 2005 36 4 2 13 22 5 12.7 12.2 $6,796,664 2006 36 5 1 13 24 1 9.7 10.8 $8,909,143 2007 1 0 0 0 0 1 39.0 21.0 $353,386 Totals 184 23 13 66 110 21 18.5 14.7 $30,239,689

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Johnson is the defending Nextel Cup champion. A list of his accomplishments from 2006:

* Won the NASCAR Nextel Cup championship.

* Had five victories, one pole, and 13 top-five and 24 top-10 finishes.

* Victories included NASCAR’s two most prestigious races, the Daytona 500 and the Brickyard 400 (the second driver to win both in the same season); as well as wins at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Talladega Superspeedway, Martinsville Speedway and the Nextel All-Star Challenge at Lowe’s Motor Speedway.

* Only four other drivers in NASCAR’s history have won the Daytona 500 and the championship in the same season: Jeff Gordon, Cale Yarborough, Richard Petty (three times) and Lee Petty.

* Tied for the best start in NASCAR history with two wins and a second-place finish in the first three races.

* Earned 20th victory in his 150th race -- only Jeff Gordon got his 20th victory in fewer races (125).

* Led the points standings for 25 of 36 weeks.

* Finished the season ranked sixth in NASCAR history for number of consecutive weeks (105) in the top 10 in the NASCAR point standings (streak began at Atlanta in March 2004).

* Only driver (in the modern era) to win at least three races in each of his first five full-time seasons.

* Voted driver of the year.

Sources: NASCAR and hendrickmotorsports.com