With Jimmie Johnson on the cusp of his fourth consecutive Cup championship heading into Sunday's season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway, it's worth looking back 30 years ago to the only other driver in NASCAR's premier series to have the opportunity to win four titles in a row.

“

We were running at close to 200 mph when all this stuff started. And other than me getting hurt after I got out of the race car, everybody else walked away from it. It says a lot about the safety of the Grand National race cars.

”

-- CALE YARBOROUGH

If not for bad luck in the four superspeedway races at Daytona and Talladega in 1979, Cale Yarborough might have rolled to championship No. 4, leaving Richard Petty and Darrell Waltrip to fight it out for the runner-up spot instead of being involved in one of the great title showdowns of all time. Then again, Yarborough's ability to literally walk away from near-disaster in a freakish end to a multi-car accident in the 1979 Winston 500 might have used up all of his good fortune that year.

The combination of Yarborough driving Junior Johnson's General Motors products was a nearly unstoppable force in the late '70s. Yarborough dominated the 1976, 1977 and 1978 seasons, winning 28 of 90 races and capturing the championship with ease over Richard Petty in '76 and '77 and Bobby Allison in '78. So when 1979 rolled around, Yarborough remained the man to beat.

And a season with four wins and 19 top-five finishes certainly kept Yarborough within striking distance of points leaders Waltrip and Petty for much of the season. But it was his finishes on the superspeedways of Daytona and Talladega -- two tracks where he'd been almost unbeatable in that three-year period -- that ultimately doomed his championship chances.

Despite his legendary last lap run-in with Donnie Allison in the Daytona 500, Yarborough was still credited with a fifth-place finish and was only 30 points behind Waltrip at the time. Even though Yarborough and Allison tangled again two weeks later at Rockingham -- with Yarborough finishing a distant 18th -- Waltrip also had issues in that race, keeping the points close.

But thanks to six consecutive top-five finishes, Waltrip had a comfortable 86-point cushion on Bobby Allison -- and 179 in front of third-place Yarborough -- when the circuit visited Talladega for the 1979 Winston 500. And rarely has a driver been more unlucky and then fortunate in the same sequence of events as Yarborough was that day.

Starting eighth, Yarborough quickly moved up to third behind Neil Bonnett and Buddy Baker when Baker suddenly fishtailed in the tri-oval and lost control. (Continued)