Not what NASCAR wanted, but this '07 Chase is over

AVONDALE, Ariz. -- It's over.

The concession speech has been made and the final ballots don't even need to be counted.

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It may not be the way NASCAR wanted it heading into the final race weekend of the season, but the Ford 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway in Miami, Fla., was reduced to an afterthought following Sunday's Checker Auto Parts 500 at Phoenix International Raceway. The Chase for the Nextel Cup is finished before the final race has started.

With Jimmie Johnson winning for the fourth consecutive week and for the series-high 10th time this season, and with his closest friend and closest pursuer, Jeff Gordon, struggling to a 10th-place finish that leaves him 86 points behind heading into Homestead, the outcome is obvious.

Gordon, who led the points race most of the 36-race season only to see it slip away under Johnson's barrage of wins at the end, admitted as much after Sunday's race.

"It's over," Gordon said. "Even if they have trouble and we still win it and we accept the check and the trophy, that's not the way you want to win a championship. We've gotten beat, bottom line. They've done the job to deserve to be champions, and we haven't.

"It's unfortunate. And right now I'm just frustrated with the way we're running, when we've run well all year long and had gotten ourselves in a great position -- and it just hasn't worked out for us. You go into it trying to figure out if it's your year and if you've got what it takes. I really thought we did, but it just wasn't meant to be this year."

Hold the champagne

Johnson wasn't so quick to accept Gordon's concession speech. But even as the words tumbled from his mouth, one got the idea that he was only being polite.

"With the lead that we have, it's a nice comfortable position to be in," Johnson said. "But we've got to go down there and run 400 miles. That's the bottom line. If we don't run the full distance of the race, we're in trouble. That takes some pressure off; it certainly does.

"But we're going go down there and try to keep it simple, like we've done to this point. We're just going to go out there and run the race and do our thing. I just heard that no one has won five in a row [in a long time], so let's go try to get that."

Why not? Everything Johnson goes for these days seems to turn golden, helping him transform what was a sizeable 68-point deficit to Gordon one month ago into an advantage that now looms as the largest for a leader heading into the final race in the short history of the Chase.

Johnson must finish 18th or better to clinch the championship, no matter what Gordon does. If he leads one lap, it only needs to be 19th or better -- and if he leads the most laps like he says he intends to do, he could still falter at the end, finish at least 21st and still walk away with the season's greatest prize for the second year in a row.

Gordon is left to wonder what might have been. There was a time, and it wasn't long ago, when he seemed destined to win his fifth championship.

Instead, he has spent the last month watching his teammate from Hendrick Motorsports get on a roll the likes of which the sport hasn't seen since, well, the last time a driver won four consecutive races.

That was in the summer of 1998, when Gordon won 13 races and captured his third series championship in four years -- fueling widespread and fairly confident speculation that he would one day perhaps surpass the all-time record of seven titles that is shared by stock-car titans Richard Petty and the late Dale Earnhardt.

Gordon wistfully remembered when Sunday.

"It's like everything is easy," Gordon said. "When you're in the racecar, it's like you're not even working. The hardest I've ever driven a racecar is when you're running 15th and 20th. When your car is working good and track position is there and the pit stops are working, it's like you can drive it with one finger.

"Jimmie's a great driver. He's driving the wheels off of it. But those guys are doing everything together -- and that's why they're winning races and why they're where they are in points right now."

What's next?

It's no doubt not what the powers-that-be in NASCAR want to hear, but where Gordon is right now mentally is focusing on next year. This year, in his mind, is finished.

He won six races, second only to Johnson, and reeled off more top-10 finishes than any other driver this season. But in the end, it wasn't good enough to win another championship. Since that magical season in 1998, he's won only one more -- and none since 2001, pre-dating the current Chase format that so many of his fans like to argue has cost him at least one more title.

He'll turn 37 years old next August. He has won 81 races in his career, more than all but four others who have pulled on driver's suits in the history of the sport.

But now he has an elephant in his own backyard. The elephant's name is Jimmie Johnson, and he's big enough and powerful enough and resourceful enough that Gordon is beginning to wonder if he can ever conjure up that kind of magic again himself.

And even if he does, will Johnson somehow find a way to be even better?

"Those guys have flat-out killed everybody," Gordon said of Johnson's No. 48 team. "You've got to give credit where credit is due, and those guys deserve a lot of credit. We didn't step up and win the races when we needed to. We gave them a run for a while, but now we have to figure out how to get the best finish we can at Homestead and go into the off-season on a positive note."

In other words, with one to go, Gordon already is locked into wait-until-next year mode.

"We've got to go to Homestead and try to end the season with our heads held up high and do something to take us into the off-season," Gordon said. "We've done the consistency thing and we've gotten beat. So obviously we've got to figure a way to get the performance up, if we're going to compete with these guys in the future. I really thought the average finish that we have would do it, and it hasn't -- because those guys have been that spectacular.

"So to me, right now it's not about the championship. It's really about the off-season and next year and getting ourselves where we need to be. I guess I need to change. I've got to figure out how to go faster; I know that -- because what I'm doing now isn't getting it done."

Well, not if he wants to be the best at Hendrick Motorsports again.

The opinions expressed are those solely of the writer