Gordon, Johnson take duel to Texas

FORT WORTH -- Momentum has ebbed and flowed for a month now in the increasingly epic duel of teammates, close friends and yet arch-rivals Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson for the Nextel Cup championship.

If the pattern holds, the tide should shift back in Gordon’s favor in today’s Dickies 500 at tricky Texas Motor Speedway.

“We had the momentum after Talladega and Charlotte,” Gordon said of his two-win burst in early October.

But after Johnson’s counterstrike victories the past two weeks at Martinsville, Va., and Atlanta, “they’ve probably got the momentum now,” Gordon conceded. “So it’s our job to try and slow that down.”

Johnson has narrowed Gordon’s points lead to nine, a margin so slim that Johnson could erase it by finishing two spots better than Gordon today. And Johnson’s No. 48 branch of the Hendrick Motorsports team has proved to be masterful down the stretch.

“We always do better at chasing,” Johnson said, pointing out that “last year we left Texas with the points lead and were able to maintain it to the end.”

Now, with three races left in the Chase -- at Fort Worth, Phoenix next week and Homestead-Miami on Nov. 18 -- Johnson seeks to become the first back-to-back Cup champion since Gordon in 1997-98.

Gordon “wants this fifth one bad,” Johnson said of his mentor, who is gunning for a fifth career championship but his first since 2001, and his first under the Chase playoff format.

“I’ve seen him driving more aggressively, more intense,” Johnson said.

But if Gordon is feeling the heat from his protege, “he’s not showing it,” Johnson said.

“It’s almost better that it’s close,” Gordon said, “because when it’s a wider gap sometimes you take an extra breath and think you’ve got room to relax, and you really don’t, and that’s when it reaches out and bites you.”

They’ve been counter-punching in two-race blows, and the tracks at Fort Worth and Phoenix appear favorable to Gordon. In the spring, he won at Phoenix and should have won at Fort Worth.

Neither driver has ever won on the weird, 1.5-mile Texas oval, which narrows precariously in places, with treacherous transitions in the banking on and off the corners.

But, “it’s not too big of a deal, really,” Johnson said. The two California-born teammates feel they’ve been homing in on a victory at the track.

Gordon dominated the April race before brushing the fourth-turn wall in his Chevrolet and falling back to a fourth-place finish. Johnson crashed because of a blown engine.

“But to back up a step, we finished second here last fall,” Johnson pointed out, “and in the spring we were running really, really well and had an engine problem that led into a crash.”

Said Gordon: “To be able to pull off that first win would be incredible, especially at this point in this Chase with everything on the line and as much as this thing is heating up.”

Gordon spent last week trying to block the whole thing out of his mind.

“To me it’s almost tougher to go through the week of thinking about it than it is once that engine starts and you get in the race and go,” he said. “I didn’t watch any racing shows. I didn’t read anything in the paper this week.”

Gordon will start on the front row today, beside pole-winner Martin Truex Jr. Johnson will start eighth.

Clint Bowyer, third in the standings, 111 points behind Gordon, will start 29th in the 43-car field. But Gordon and Johnson kept fretting about the second-year Cup driver who has hung in the Chase.

“It’s very easy for Clint Bowyer to make a charge at this thing,” Gordon said. “He’s hovering there, and doing what he needs to do. If we have a bad day, he’s right there.”

While Bowyer wasn’t conceding the title to the Hendrick duo by points, he all but conceded to them by rights.

“Jimmie and Jeff deserve it,” Bowyer said. “They’re the ones that are putting on the show right now. We just have to race as hard as we can and try to be there for the taking if one or both of them slip up.”

The trouble with Texas, Gordon said, is that “this is a very easy track for that mistake to be made. You carry a lot of speed off the corners here. The walls come up on you in a hurry.”

That’s how he made the slight brush in Turn 4 that cost him the last race.

“The track narrows up there,” he said. “What I beat myself up the most about in that deal here in the spring is, I didn’t need to be pushing quite that hard. I had quite a good lead, it’s very difficult to pass here and we were in the driver’s seat on that situation.”

That’s where he is in the Chase, with Johnson on his bumper, and the walls of Texas Motor Speedway coming up fast on every lap.

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Ed Hinton covers auto racing for Tribune Co. newspapers.