Five Down, Five to Go!
Monday, October 18th, 2010By: Drew Hierwarter
After the first five races of the 2010 Chase for the Championship, with five more to go, Jimmy Johnson has a modest 41 point lead over Denny Hamlin.
What do the next five races hold for the four time champion? Well, if we knew that there would be no reason to actually run those races. And I’ve always been the last one to try to predict anything as unpredictable as a motor race.
But you can look at the numbers from past races and get somewhat of an idea of what might be coming as long as nothing wildly unusual happens.
The next two races on the schedule, Martinsville and Talladega are considered to be “wild cards” in that just about anything can happen. You can be driving a smart race, playing all your cards exactly right, get yourself in position to win, and something completely out of your control can ruin your day.
At Martinsville, Johnson has 6 wins and an average finish of 5.4. He will be good there again. Things are not so rosy at Talladega where a finishing average of 17.8 has produced only one win. A top ten finish at Talladega would be considered good and should keep him in the lead.
Things get a little better at Texas where Johnson has an average finish of tenth and also only one win. And then we get to Phoenix where he has racked up 4 wins, with an average finish of 5th and where he has completed an impressive 100% of the laps.
Johnson’s stats at Homestead-Miami Speedway are a little misleading because each of the past four years he has come into that race with enough of a points lead that he hasn’t needed to have a good finish. (I think I remember one year where he needed only to finish 35th and the title was his.) So his 12.7 finishing average with no wins is not any sort of indication of what the 48 team is capable of if they need to step it up.
Denny Hamlin in spite of his 6 wins this season (The same as Johnson, by the way) has not shown the sort of consistency needed to finish strong. He has only one finish outside the top ten since the start of the chase, but he has not gained as many points each week as has Johnson.
Kevin Harvick, after leading the points for almost the entire regular season, also has only one Chase finish outside the top ten but is still 77 points behind the leader.
We all know that, especially in motorsports, anything can happen. But if you look at the numbers it would be hard to imagine Jimmy Johnson not being the 2010 NASCAR Sprint Cup Champion.
I’m just sayin’.