FORT WORTH, Texas -- Jimmie Johnson felt like he was back at the go-kart track. Over the final laps Sunday at Texas Motor Speedway, he was mashing down on the accelerator so hard, his foot was falling asleep.

No, he didn't catch friend and Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jeff Gordon, who snapped a 47-race winless streak on the 1.5-mile track. But his runner-up result did put the finishing flourish on another of those vintage Johnson efforts, one where over the course of a long, windswept afternoon he went from almost out of it to Gordon's main competition for the six-shooters awarded in Victory Lane. Carl Edwards was knocked out by a pit-road mistake, Dale Earnhardt Jr. by a collision with the wall, pole winner David Reutimann by a penalty for pitting out of the box. The only driver left to seriously challenge Gordon was Johnson, who came up .378 seconds short.

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Jimmie Johnson talks about his second-place finish at Texas.

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Still, it was one of those days for which Johnson's team has become famous -- or infamous, depending on your allegiance. Johnson started ninth, struggled early with his car's handling, and quickly faded to the middle of the field during a track-record, 96-lap green-flag run. By the halfway point, a driver who had been fastest in Saturday's final practice session found himself buried in 18th. But in what's becoming its trademark, the No. 48 outfit steadily improved as the day wore on, and was up front when it counted most.

"I'm just very proud of the composure we kept [Sunday] to fight through the ill-handling car at the start," Johnson said. "We just didn't have it right for some reason. We made some changes [Saturday] night, and [Saturday] the car was so comfortable and predictable, I think it took us a couple stops to kind of recognize that the track wasn't going to come to us."

Like his championship-winning seasons, the slow start proved only a minor obstacle. Crew chief Chad Knaus toyed with tire pressure, wedge and track-bar adjustments, and toward the end of the race finally stabilized the car enough for Johnson to drive it to the front. Once it got into clean air, the No. 48 was a bullet. Had the race been a few laps longer, Johnson very well might have won, given that his deficit to Gordon was 1.415 seconds at the start of the final, 26-lap green-flag run, and by the end was only a fraction of that.

"I was chipping away at his lead, but kind of ran out of time," Johnson said. "The cool thing about those last 28 laps was, there was nothing left out there. My foot, it feels like I was at the go-kart track. Push on the gas pedal so hard, your foot is asleep. My foot is still tingling from pushing the pedal so hard. It was fun, fun to drive that hard."

And no, he didn't sandbag so his teammate Gordon could snap his more than year-long winless streak.

"I ran Jeff's line, put pressure on him. He didn't make any mistakes," Johnson said. "I could only get so close. I tried the top side. Nothing really panned out. I went back down to the bottom and started making up a little bit of time again, hoping that that would put pressure on him and force him into a mistake. But he drove a perfect race."

But Johnson was coming, making up a few tenths of a second each time around the big, fast Texas track. At one point Gordon skidded through a corner, and Johnson thought he had his opening, but the four-time series champion recovered. Five more laps, Johnson surmises, and he might have had a chance to overtake Gordon. Of course, they were five laps he wouldn't get.

"We were both driving as hard as we could," Johnson said. "It was nice to get our car up to the front and get some clean air on it. We had to work really hard all day long to get the car right, so I'm very proud of the team. We have our old style back, where we just keep plugging away and we'll get it right come the end of the race. In another five laps we would have been racing with him. I'm not sure what would have happened, but it was a great race altogether, and I'm very happy for Jeff."

Johnson may not have won, but in the bigger picture, it was quite a productive day. With his third consecutive finish of third or better -- the runner-up effort at Texas coming on the heels of a victory at Martinsville a week earlier -- Johnson improved two more positions in points. The three-time defending series champion has jumped 11 spots in the past three weeks, and is beginning to enter very familiar territory. Now he's second in the standings, behind only Gordon, and like his teammate building momentum.

"We're doing so much better this year than last year," said Johnson, who at this point a season ago stood sixth. "We have the speed in the cars, and it's just about us as a team, gelling and hitting our stride and doing the right things. We're really getting close to having perfect races."