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.

"We were coming down the frontstretch and I noticed Buddy was a little bit loose," Yarborough said. "Then as we came through the dogleg, Buddy's car just turned sideways right at the start-finish line and I was right behind him. You know, I had nowhere to go. The only thing I could do to try to miss him was turn hard left, and I did."

Yarborough's evasive action only put him in more danger, as his No. 11 Oldsmobile then slid out of control through the infield grass.

"My car got sideways and Benny Parsons got me in the door," he said. "He had nowhere to go, either. From then on, it was just a wild ride down through the mud and the grass. My car, at one time, got airborne and stayed in the air for [what felt like] several minutes but I'm sure it was just seconds. Then when it came down, the car kept sliding down through the grass and the mud and finally slid up on the edge of the race track and stopped."

Other cars involved in the accident included Tighe Scott, Dick Brooks, Lennie Pond, a young driver named Dale Earnhardt and veteran Dave Marcis.

"I sat there for a little while and waited until I thought everything was over," Yarborough said. "Then I got out of my car to take a look at it and Dave Marcis' car was stopped fairly close to mine. As I walked out of my car down towards the front of it, another car came in and hit Marcis head-on, knocked him into me and just pinned me in between the two cars."

D.K. Ulrich, trying to get back to the pits with four flat tires, was rolling slowly along the track apron when he realized too late that he couldn't avoid hitting Marcis. And Yarborough had no time to leap out of the way.

"Marcis' bumper caught my legs on the tire, and I felt the tire give," Yarborough said. "And really I didn't know if that's what it was or not. For a minute there, I thought it had cut both my legs off. It hit hard and I thought I had at least broken my legs. I was fortunate enough to come out with bad bruises."

Amazingly, Yarborough escaped without serious injuries. Not only that, he climbed back into the cockpit six days later and won at Nashville.

"We were running at close to 200 mph when all this stuff started," Yarborough said. "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."

However, the 33rd-place finish at Talladega, coupled with Allison and Waltrip running 1-2, put Yarborough in a hole out of which he could never extricate himself. He finished a miserable 20th in Daytona's Firecracker 400 and then blew engines at Talladega (24th) and Michigan (17th) to effectively end any chances of defending his crown.

Still, Yarborough wound up with seven top-five finishes, including a victory at Charlotte, in the season's final 10 races to finish third in the standings as Petty edged Waltrip by 11 points to take the title. Yarborough came close again in 1980, losing the championship by 19 points to Earnhardt in what would be his last full-time ride.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.