Want to beat Johnson? There's only one way to

Jimmie Johnson must be stopped.

The nerve of the guy. Three consecutive championships on NASCAR's highest level, in an era when the sanctioning body has taken all kinds of actions -- like a new car and a revamped playoff format -- to try and foster more level competition? Unthinkable. And yet here he is, one 36th-place finish (or better) at Homestead-Miami Speedway away from tying the record for consecutive titles set three decades ago by Cale Yarborough. It just isn't supposed to happen in this day and age. Run that winning No. 48 car from Phoenix through the inspection bay one more time. Surely chew chief Chad Knaus is up to some kind of witchery again.

Oh, well. It's inevitable now. At this point, it seems, only complete catastrophe -- like the engine failure Johnson suffered in the Coca-Cola 600 that doomed him to a 39th-place finish, his only result worse than 36th all season -- will prevent Johnson from receiving yet another big trophy and another big check. And then, it's Jimmie photographed in Times Square. Jimmie on Letterman. Jimmie ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Jimmie applauded at the Waldorf-Astoria. Really, everyone could stay home, NASCAR could patch together some old video footage, and no one would know the difference.

But either way, he'll arrive in Daytona in February with another championship year stitched to the breast of his firesuit, and gunning for something no driver in any of NASCAR's major series has ever done -- four titles in a row. Four in a row! Do you realize how rare that is? It's never happened in football. It hasn't happened in baseball since the Yankees won five consecutive in the 1950s. It hasn't happened in basketball since the Celtics dominated things in the 1960s. Sure, Sebastien Bourdais won four consecutive championships on the defunct Champ Car circuit, but that was a fading series weakened by defections to the Indy Racing League. Throw that out, and there are only two major open-wheel drivers to ever have won four or more titles consecutively: Formula One legends Michael Schumacher and Juan Manuel Fangio.

So Johnson, already in quite elite company, is on the brink of ascending into some very rarefied air. Given how he's dominated the series for the past three years, there's no reason to believe he won't get there. The rest of the field hasn't been able to stop him. The competitive restraints placed on the entire garage by NASCAR haven't been able to stop him. Big, bad Toyota, which seemed on the verge of world domination a few years ago (if some fans of domestic carmakers are to be believed), hasn't been able to stop him. The economic downturn which has crippled so many teams hasn't been able to stop him. The hit-or-miss nature of Goodyear tires hasn't been able to stop him. No matter the situation, no matter the track, he just wins. (Continued)