Chad Knaus sits on the leather sofa in the lounge of the team transporter, fiddling with his cellular telephone, restless as always with the prospect of being still. It's a cloudless Friday afternoon at Texas Motor Speedway, less than an hour before Sprint Cup qualifying, and a third consecutive championship is looming as large as the No. 48 car in an opponent's rear-view mirror. But even with a 183-point lead -- larger than any driver has ever had in the short history of the Chase -- and only three weeks remaining in the 2008 season, the crew chief is anything but relaxed.

"We've got three races that are very, very difficult races. We've got a long damn ways to go," Knaus says. "I think we've got 1,220 miles to go. That's a long way."

In three weeks Jimmie Johnson will be holding yet another sterling silver trophy, but at the moment that season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway is far from anyone's mind. There are still cars to prepare and pit stops to make and races to be run, hurdles to be overcome and triumphs to achieve. The size of Johnson's advantage over Carl Edwards only seems to increase the anxiousness over what could be lost. The driver is hunkering down in his motor home. Hendrick Motorsports executives are cautious about giving interviews. No question, the confidence and composure that have always been hallmarks of the No. 48 operation are still in existence; they carry themselves like members of a team that expects to win. But the pressure is on, and everyone's feeling it.

“

I look around and I see things that have gone on with other teams, and I face that reality every time I get in the car. And I know that anything can happen.

”

JIMMIE JOHNSON

Are they being overly cautious? At this point, with bright sunlight glinting off the wide expanse of the Fort Worth grandstand, it certainly seems so. The gap separating Johnson from Carl Edwards, his closest pursuer, is wider than the total number of points one driver can gain on another in a single event. Johnson has yet to finish worse than ninth in any race in this Chase. Edwards may have won the most recent race, at Atlanta Motor Speedway, but Johnson finished right behind him. The best team in NASCAR is clearly on top of its game. What is everyone so worried about?

The unknown. "I have no clue how these next few races are going to go," says Johnson, clad in a blue golf shirt and Lowe's ball cap, which has become his standard out-of-the-car uniform over the latter stages of the season. "The potential is there where you can lose a lot of points. I mean 34 points for a 43rd spot, that's a big swing. A lot can happen, and we need to go out and get every point we can."

That quest begins at Texas, a place that's been very good to Johnson, a track where he won the previous fall to effectively squash the title hopes of teammate Jeff Gordon. It looks like business as usual -- a car that's 12th or better in each of the weekend's three practice sessions, and seventh in qualifying. Whatever weaknesses this team has are locked away beneath the Chevrolet's silver and blue hood. As the weeks pass, it's become clear that Johnson isn't coming back to the pack on his own. The other drivers pursuing him are going to need some help.

In a sport where machinery plays such a prominent role, failures are part of the game, and this Chase is no different. The two men who were to be Johnson's biggest rivals for this championship, Kyle Busch and Edwards, have already seen their campaigns derailed or scuttled altogether because of catastrophic breakdowns. Busch, the points leader for 17 weeks entering the playoff, was knocked out by a broken suspension piece and engine failure in successive weeks. Edwards lost serious ground when his ignition box conked out at Charlotte. No driver, Johnson included, is immune to such a fate.

"Definitely, the wheels can fall off that 48 in a hurry," says Greg Biffle, third in points and still hopeful. "We've seen it happen, and maybe you get comfortable and kind of relaxed and stuff jumps out and bites you. That can happen. Absolutely. That's why we're not going to walk away with our tail between our legs yet. After Phoenix, if he's got enough of a margin to clinch the title, then we will walk away with our tail between our legs. But until then, we're not going to."

Even Johnson seems to realize that the mechanical gremlins are out there, ready to strike. "I look around and I see things that have gone on with other teams, and I face that reality every time I get in the car," he says. "And I know that anything can happen."

Yet in Johnson's case, anything usually doesn't happen. Over his three-year run of dominance on the Sprint Cup circuit, catastrophic parts failures on his No. 48 car have been exceedingly rare. He's suffered only one this season -- an engine blowup in May, late in the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte. Johnson wins because he's talented, because he has great equipment, and because of the rigid quality control standards at Hendrick Motorsports, which try to weed out problem pieces before they cost a driver a race. Employees pore over thousands of parts looking for defects, work that can be monotonous and time-consuming but can ultimately mean the difference between a championship and second place. This title, which will ultimately be decided by 69 points, was in some ways won before the car ever left the shop.

Lessons from a wire lock

The piece was called a wire lock. It was a small component that Hendrick was buying from an outside vendor, and something the organization had never had a problem with -- until two years ago at Michigan International Speedway, when a wire lock inside Gordon's No. 24 car failed, causing the motor to blow and forcing a car capable of winning to sputter to a premature finish.

"It was just not something that we checked," Jeff Andrews, Hendrick's director of engine development, says in an interview two days after Johnson's title is safely clinched. "It was a simple part and assumed to be of a certain size and a certain spec, and it failed while leading the race and cost us a race."

Now, because of that incident, every wire lock that passes through Hendrick Motorsports is inspected by hand. Every year, more parts are added to the list of things that need to be documented and inspected before they go into the car. It's not easy work, scrutinizing these miniature pieces, over and over, searching for the smallest defect. But it's become absolutely necessary, and it shows in the reliability of the Hendrick cars -- in particular those of Johnson, whose competitors for the Sprint Cup championship are left hoping for a breakdown that will never come.

It's not easy work, scrutinizing these miniature pieces, over and over, searching for the smallest defect. But it's become absolutely necessary, and it shows in the reliability of the Hendrick cars -- in particular those of Johnson, whose competitors for the Sprint Cup championship are left hoping for a breakdown that will never come.

"We've got a lot of systems and procedures set in place, and we hold the guys to that. It's difficult to do. It's difficult to get everybody to follow specific formats and checklists and procedures all the time. Things slip through the cracks from time to time. But our guys are very, very attentive. They pay attention. They don't want to be the one to have something go wrong, so they really pay attention to the details. The details are what win races and win championships sometimes," Knaus says.

"Take your car to your local dealership or car service area and get your heater fixed. You've got probably a 75 percent chance that it's going to work. Maybe it was assembled incorrectly or the wrong parts were ordered or they made the wrong diagnosis, whatever it may be. That's what you deal with in the normal world going to a professional. Well, in our world, we can't have that. We can't have 75 percent. We've got to have 99.9 percent, or 100 percent. It's hard."

At Hendrick, every component that goes into the racecar is taken out after the event. They're measured, put through a Magnaflux machine to check for flaws, eyeballed for cracks. Cars are stripped, disassembled, and then reassembled again. Before they ever go under the hood, engines are put through two 800-mile tests on Hendrick's in-house dynamometer. Follow-ups are done on anything that looks suspect, whether it's a part coming off the car, or something the driver picks up on during a race. Everybody takes notes. Everything is written down. Nothing is left to chance.

"The processes and the procedures and the documentation, in our engine shop and I know in Hendrick Motorsports as a whole, have probably been one of the areas that we have put a greater amount of emphasis on in the last five years," Andrews says. "With all that comes some routine and sometimes monotony on assembly processes, the practices that you're using to build engines and check parts and manufacture parts. You want to catch it before it gets in an engine, that's the optimum thing. If you catch one part out of 1,000 pieces, then somebody has to check those parts day after day after day. Sure, it can get to be routine and it can get to be questioned as to why that part is continued to be looked at and checked if you haven't found anything, sometimes over a year and a half or two-year span."

But still, they keep checking. Documentation is copious. Crewmen need to know exactly how long parts have been in service to avoid pushing them too far. Again, according to Hendrick vice president for development Doug Duchardt, the goal is to eliminate guesswork.

"You need to have discipline to know that when you put that part into service, it's been in service how long it needs to be in service before we pull it out," Duchardt says. "You have to have disciplined systems in place to track those components through the system. If you have an engine with a crank shaft and an oil pump and other components you're going to continue to use, you need to understand what kind of life those components went through before you put them back into another engine. If you have a transmission in the same situation, you need to understand what those components have gone through. Because if you don't, there's just no way for you to manage the reliability of what you have. You're always going to be wondering, how many miles does this part have on it? Let's get a new one. You can't manage that way."

You can't win a championship that way, either.

'It's still a race'

Yet even with all those safeguards, human error can still creep in. That much becomes obvious early in the Texas race, when the No. 48 car begins sliding steadily backward, and something appears very wrong. Before the 100-lap mark, Johnson finds himself a lap down to Edwards, who is storming around the track as if on a mission. He wants to win, and bury Johnson in the process. He's on his way to doing it. Suddenly, all that anxiety appears justified, and a 183-point lead doesn't seem big enough.

"We're in trouble, boys," the usually unflappable Johnson says over the radio. "We f---ing killed it."

Much later, Knaus will learn of a miscalculation in tire pressure, a discovery that will help the No, 48 car make up ground. But at the moment it looks like they've whiffed on the setup, something that hasn't happened to this extent since the third race of the season at Las Vegas. Suddenly, Edwards might not need a parts failure after all.

Up on the pit box, Knaus can be gruff and no-nonsense, growling at lapped traffic or barking at his team's public relations representative to get visitors out of the way. No stone is left unturned ...

Knaus, usually the high-strung one in this driver/crew chief relationship, becomes the voice of reason in the midst of crisis at Texas. Up on the pit box, Knaus can be gruff and no-nonsense, growling at lapped traffic or barking at his team's public relations representative to get visitors out of the way. No stone is left unturned -- before the race he reminds his crewmen to stay hydrated and have lights ready for the nighttime finish, and reminds Johnson of even simple things like the fact that his brake and tire fans are on different switches. Surely by now, the driver knows this, could flip the switches in his sleep. But like the guys poring over parts back at the shop, Knaus leaves nothing to chance. Two weeks later, when he notices a small crack in the pit wall at Homestead, he'll have crewmen cover it with tape to prevent the air hose from getting hung up.

Johnson, meanwhile, has been laying low, bunkering in his motor coach, trying to keep things as hassle-free as possible. His wife Chandra doesn't arrive in Texas until the day of the race, so Johnson retreats to the sanctity of the motor home lot, even breaking from his normal workout routine. The message is clear -- no distractions. The championship is very close now, and it requires total focus.

At the moment, though, that focus is rattled by a balky racecar and an event featuring so many lapped cars that Johnson can't catch up with the leaders. "We'll get it back," Knaus reassures him. And after a pit stop on Lap 115, they seem to hit on a combination that works. "Go get 'em, brother," Knaus tells Johnson over the radio. "We found something that was wrong. Now you're back."

Not quite. Edwards is too fast and the green-flag runs are too long, and the best Johnson can do is salvage a 15th-place finish, his worst in the Chase in more than two years. Edwards gambles on fuel, wins, cuts the points margin to a more manageable 106, and seems to seize the momentum. For the first time since its championship-winning run began, the No. 48 team looks beatable. Johnson is clearly frustrated, to the point where he compares his evening with getting kicked in the groin over and over.

Knaus' warning two days earlier now sounds prophetic. The race is on.

"There's still 400 miles at Homestead and 300 at Phoenix. A lot can happen," Johnson says, echoing the words of his crew chief. "Even at 183 points over Carl, I wasn't comfortable. I mean, I think it's 161 points you can get in a weekend. If I stuffed it in the fence the first run, I finish 43rd, they're right there. It's a race of 20 or 30 points at that point. Now that comfort margin has even closed up more. So it's still a race."

Cool under crisis

Race day, 8 a.m. The garage area at Phoenix International Raceway has just opened, and crewmen wearing uniform shirts of various colors are streaming toward their respective garage stalls. Chad Knaus' cell phone rings. Johnson, a renowned early-riser, is on the other end wondering about the car.

Knaus is in no mood for conversation. "Dude," he tells Johnson, "let me get to work."

Johnson hangs up. Fifteen minutes later, he calls back. This time the crew chief is a bit more brusque, ordering his driver to go back to sleep the same way he orders photographers out of his pit stall during a race. "Well, damnit," Johnson retorts, "make me feel better about what's going to happen today."

Back in an area of the country he knows well from his off-road racing days, Johnson sounds more sure of himself than he has all year.

It's a new track and a new race, but the members of the No. 48 team are still stewing over their uncharacteristic shortcomings at Texas. Johnson seems antsy, ready to get going, ready to show people what his program is really capable of, ready to put some more distance between himself and the suddenly surging Edwards. Friday he was fastest in opening practice and first in pole qualifying, with Edwards well behind him in 15th. In Saturday' final practice the Lowe's car had dropped to 16th-fastest, but there was no panic over the radio. Knaus had clearly hit on something. Exactly what, everyone would discover after the green flag.

Phoenix brings a different Johnson from the one that left Texas deflated and searching. Back in an area of the country he knows well from his off-road racing days, Johnson sounds more sure of himself than he has all year. He wants to win the race, gain maximum points on Edwards, and ensure that he can clinch the title by just starting the season finale the next week at Homestead. All indications, Johnson's race-morning impetuousness aside, are that he has a car capable of doing it. Whatever momentum swing there was, it now seems only temporary.

Maybe Jay Leno helped ease the tension. Johnson flew to Los Angeles and appeared on the comedian's late-night talk show on the Thursday before the Phoenix race, sharing the bill with actress Julia Louis Dreyfus and musician David Archuleta. Among other things, Leno -- a noted car enthusiast -- jokes with Johnson about the similarities between automobile racing and sex. "Both are very physically demanding," Johnson deadpans.

"It wasn't bad," Johnson says later of the experience. "We had some fun with it. Some of the things I didn't think came off as funny as they could have, and other parts of it I thought were really funny. It was cool to hang out with Jay. He was really excited for me to be there. He took me outside and showed me this Oldsmobile car that has 1,200 horsepower in it that he finished up. Great personality, very friendly, spent a lot of time in the green room talking to all the guests. So all in all, a great experience."

So, it turns out, is the Phoenix race. Whatever nervousness there was leaving Texas has been replaced by an almost unwavering confidence, reflected in the size of the entourage surrounding Johnson's pit box on race day. Friends from his hometown of El Cajon, Calif. -- including pro baseball players Mike Hampton and Marcus and Brian Giles, who train in Phoenix during the offseason -- are out in force, giving the whole thing the air of a coronation. Johnson does his part, leading 217 of 312 laps to dominate the event. There's one brief moment of worry, brought on by a valve spring failure in teammate Gordon's car. But like the weekend, the race is flawless.

In Phoenix's cramped Victory Lane, amid splashes of sprayed champagne, Johnson holds up a trophy shaped like the state of Arizona. Soon, he'll be holding aloft another, much more valuable prize.

"Spectacular performance," Knaus tells his troops over the radio, with good reason. The lead is now 141 points, meaning that Johnson can clinch the title with a 36th-place finish seven days later at Homestead. In Phoenix's cramped Victory Lane, amid splashes of sprayed champagne, Johnson holds up a trophy shaped like the state of Arizona. Soon, he'll be holding aloft another, much more valuable prize.

It's all textbook Johnson, the kind of performance the No. 48 has built its reputation on. When the pressure of the championship chase is greatest, they've never failed to perform. They did it in 2006, rebounding from a 156-point deficit with five consecutive finishes of second or better. They did it in 2007, winning four races in a row to put Gordon away. And they're doing it in 2008, finishing ninth or better in the Chase's first seven races, and winning at the very moment when Edwards thinks he's gained some measure of control.

They don't plan on it, don't aim for it. They're at a loss to explain it.

"I have no clue, to be honest," Johnson says. "We're just racing. We're just going out there and racing and doing what we know how to do and trying to be smart about it. But at the same time, I don't think that what I'm doing or what I'm attempting to do is any different than any of the other guys when they show up for the Chase, when they show up for each race weekend. I mean, we all have the same goal -- be smart, race smart, qualify on the pole, get the best finish you can. You set those goals out there, and my goals are no different than anybody else's. It's not that we're spending more time thinking about it or focusing on it, it's just worked out for us."

Knaus, though, has some theories. The No. 48 team has made a habit of playing with setups near the end of the regular season, looking for things that might serve them well in the Chase. "We do it absolutely all the time," the crew chief says. "We threw some pretty big stuff at it in Chicago. We threw some pretty big stuff at it in Fontana. Both of those races pulled some good results, and we're using what we learned at those races at the current tracks."

Knaus believes Johnson's level of physical fitness -- no coincidence, perhaps, that he and Edwards are the two most fit drivers in the garage -- helps him stay sharp toward the latter stages of a 38-week grind. Knaus believes the struggles the No. 48 team faced early in the season, when they had trouble getting a handle on the new car, helped them get better as the year went along. And Knaus believes that his veteran squad's level of composure, something evident over the radio even in heated moments, pays dividends when the pressure is on.

"In any crisis situation, our team does a very good job. And obviously the Chase is a 10-week crisis situation," Knaus says. "I think everyone on the Lowe's team does a good job, Jimmie does a good job of when the pressure ramps up, to keep a level head. The team does the same thing. When the pressure builds, we stay pretty flat, and perform well. It's not like you just flip a switch. It's very difficult. I think more so it's the teams that can handle the pressure and adapt to changing situations in the Chase that run well. If you look at the 99 [car of Edwards], they run very, very well. We've done well. In the past the 17 car [of Matt Kenseth] has been very strong in the Chase. Teams like that, that typically have a pretty even demeanor, typically do well."

Whatever it is, it works. The victory at Phoenix raises Johnson's average finish in 49 career Chase races to an impressive 8.5, a number that includes 14 wins, eight more runner-up finishes -- and two championships. And he's not finished yet.

Champagne and confetti

On the first day of the final week of the 2008 NASCAR season, Johnson wakes up in Phoenix, after a night of celebrating his victory with friends. He flies back to Charlotte on Monday, packs and works out on Tuesday morning, and is in Miami in time to attend a charity gala hosted by Juan Montoya on Tuesday night. Wednesday he goes for a run on Miami Beach, has dinner at Joe's Stone Crab, and attends a Black Crowes concert. He's staying busy, using up as much energy as he can during the day, so he's tired and ready to fall asleep at night.

Thursday brings a commercial shoot, and then mandatory attendance at NASCAR's annual championship contenders news conference, held this season at a luxury hotel in Coral Gables. Johnson and Edwards sit at a table, the Sprint Cup trophy between them, a number of past champions watching from the audience. NASCAR attempts to heighten the drama, showing a video montage of each driver's season, trying to create the perception that the title is still in doubt. But with a 141-point lead, Johnson would need an absolute collapse to avoid tying Cale Yarborough with a third consecutive title.

“

In the past championships you decide them maybe a race early, but then in the Chase anything can happen. It just brings a lot of pressure and a lot of nervousness, I guess, and I don't get used to it.

”

RICK HENDRICK

Edwards knows it. "I'm hoping Jimmie forgets how to drive," he says, "or has some sort of trouble between now and Sunday."

Johnson, poker-faced as always, gives nothing away. "We're definitely in a great position, but at the end of the day, we've still got to run the race and still have to go out and get the points needed to win the championship. So we're approaching it like we would any other race weekend," he says. But he does concede one thing. "I do feel less pressure," he adds, "at least as of now."

With good reason. His rebound at Phoenix was a crushing blow to Edwards, who needs to win and lead the most laps at Homestead-Miami Speedway, and then hope Johnson has the kind of devastating mechanical failure he never seems to have. The Roush Fenway driver finds a ray of hope on Friday, when Johnson uncharacteristically struggles to get his car up to speed coming to the green flag to take his qualifying lap, and is forced to start in 30th place. For a team trying to play it conservatively, this is dangerous territory. Knaus will be forced to pit the car well down pit road, wedged between the teams of Dave Blaney and Sterling Marlin. And Johnson will have to battle backmarkers, and the crashes they sometimes create, as he tries to fight his way to the front.

"That's not where we want to be," Knaus says. "There's a lot of mayhem that goes on back there, especially at this racetrack, with the way it widens up. You have people all over the racetrack. That's always a concern. People say, 'Well, that's just bad luck if you get caught up in a wreck when you're in the back of the field.' But quite honestly, if you hadn't qualified so poorly, you wouldn't be back there, and you wouldn't get in a wreck."

Suddenly, a little bit of that anxiousness is creeping back in. Edwards will start fourth, well ahead of Johnson, meaning that he'll take a chunk out of the points lead the instant the race begins. The goal for Sunday, Knaus says, is just to keep the No. 99 car in sight. It promises to produce more nervous moments for car owner Rick Hendrick, who paced up and down pit road as the caution-plagued Phoenix race neared its conclusion. Even a man closing in on his eighth championship still feels the jitters.

"You know, I wish I could tell you that I've gotten used to it, but I don't," Hendrick says. "I think I get more nervous, or as nervous, as I ever have. In Phoenix, that was the longest race that I ever can remember. And then when you have restarts, two or three restarts, you've just got so much riding on it. In the past championships you decide them maybe a race early, but then in the Chase anything can happen. It just brings a lot of pressure and a lot of nervousness, I guess, and I don't get used to it. It hasn't hit me yet. Sunday morning when they line up and start is when I'll wear out my shoes going back and forth down pit road, because I can't stand still. We think we've got a really good shot at closing the deal, but we could have the motor problem like Jeff [Gordon] did in the first 10 laps [at Phoenix], and then we're done. So I'll rest better Sunday night, hopefully."

Johnson eases his car owner's nerves considerably on Saturday, showing the true potential within the No. 48 car by placing first and third, respectively, in the weekend's final two practice sessions. Race day dawns unseasonably cool and breezy, conditions that haven't deterred hundreds of people from jamming into the Sprint Cup garage on this final afternoon of the season. It's easy to find plenty of fans in No. 48 gear, especially children, who often follow for a lifetime whatever teams are most dominant during their youth. A large crowd has gathered around the back of the Lowe's hauler, supporters hoping for one last autograph before the year comes to a close.

It won't go down as Johnson's best race. Stuck in the back because of his poor qualifying effort, he's easily frustrated by the conduct of drivers that he's not used to being around. Later, he'll complain about people who "drive like idiots." Like every driver, he's having trouble with the late-afternoon glare, to the point where he can't make out his pit board when he drives onto pit road. He asks Knaus to count him down just to make sure. Late in the race, Knaus will take two tires, just to give Johnson some track position and help his driver escape the hornet's nest at the back.

"It's so hard to pass back there in traffic," the crew chief tells a television reporter during the race. "Being cautious at the back isn't a lot of fun."

Eventually Johnson works his way out of it, cracking the top 10 by Lap 154. The points lead, which had been down to 53 earlier in the event, climbs back to 80. From there it's just a matter of making laps and staying out of trouble. Edwards has the hammer down, is en route to his series-leading ninth victory of the season, but it won't be enough. Johnson comes home in 15th, an unspectacular finish that yields a spectacular result. Crewmen stand on the pit wall as the No. 48 car flies by for the final time, and trade high-fives when that third consecutive championship -- something that hasn't been done in 30 years -- is at last secured.

From there, it's all routine -- the big burnout, the trophy presentation on the stage trucked onto the frontstretch, handshakes and embraces among men and women with pieces of confetti stuck to their shoulders and back. "It hasn't sunken in yet," Johnson says, "but I'm just so proud of this race team and the fight that this team has had in it over the course of the year. There were times this season when we weren't even in the ballpark, but these guys buckled down and worked hard. I'm so proud of this team effort. I mean, how cool. I mean growing up in El Cajon, Calif., racing motocross, I never thought I'd be in this position."

And what a position it is -- one of just two men with three consecutive championships, one of only eight drivers with three or more titles. The rest of the night is a blur, from media obligations to the championship party at the historic Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. Johnson estimates he gets about an hour and a half of sleep before he's on the go again, this time for a media tour of New York and ESPN studios in Bristol, Conn. At ESPN, Johnson sees Mike Ditka in the hallway, and makes a point of introducing himself to the Super Bowl-winning coach. No introductions are necessary.

"I know who you are, champ," Ditka tells him. "And by the way, you are a dynasty."