It's a three-race Chase for those pursuing Johnson

Southern California, where NASCAR competes this weekend, is Jimmie Johnson country. He used to go to the old Riverside International Raceway, mainly for off-road truck races, but did attend a few Cup Series events at the famed (and now bygone) road course. Once in the late 1980s, he and his father Gary began at the start-finish line and walked the entire way around the 2.62-mile course in the Inland Empire. Even then, the kid was savvy enough to recognize that one of the drivers in the starting field wasn't a regular, but a car owner named Rick Hendrick.

In NASCAR, sometimes the cars aren't the only things that come full circle. These days Johnson returns to SoCal as Hendrick's lead driver, a four-time consecutive champion who's rewritten record books and emerged as one of the greats in his sport. The homecomings are a very big deal -- this week, Johnson visited a middle school in his hometown outside San Diego, and hosted a dinner and a golf tournament that together raised over a half a million dollars for his charitable foundation. And then he gets in the race car, where the nice guy turns into an absolute monster.

Jimmie Johnson

Remaining Chase tracks

Track	Wins	Avg. Fin.
Fontana	5	5.5
Charlotte	6	10.2
Martinsville	6	5.4
Talladega	1	17.8
Texas	1	10.1
Phoenix	4	4.9
Homestead	0	12.7

• Shop: Johnson gear

Yes, he's up only eight points on Denny Hamlin in the standings. Yes, there are seven drivers within 100 points of the leader, the most ever through the first three races in the Chase. Yes, the top 11 championship contenders -- sorry, Clint Bowyer -- are more tightly bundled together than at any other time since NASCAR's playoff system was expanded. There are still seven races, more than half the postseason, remaining. All of the numbers scream that this is very much still anybody's title to win.

Well, the numbers can lie. What the numbers don't tell you is that if anyone wants to end Johnson's streak of championships before it reaches a previously unthinkable fifth consecutive title, they probably have only three weeks to do it.

Johnson's homecoming opens a three-week run on three of his best tracks on the Sprint Cup tour, a trio of speedways where he has 17 combined victories and wins roughly once every three times he rolls off the truck. Yes, moving Talladega a little later in the season allows that hand-wringing beast to lurk out there a while longer, but it also creates a three-week window during which Johnson can break the will of his competition. After all, that's what he did last year, when he trailed Mark Martin by 18 points after Kansas, then went 1-1-2 at Fontana, Charlotte and Martinsville, and went to Talladega with a triple-digit lead secure enough that he could have started scribbling notes for his banquet speech.

So save me this "closest ever" stuff. Are there other drivers in this Chase capable of winning the thing? Absolutely. Hamlin, Jeff Gordon, Kevin Harvick or Carl Edwards aren't going to give it away. But they're also not likely to win it if they can't keep pace with Johnson on Sunday and over the following two weekends. As far as stopping Johnson is concerned, Auto Club Speedway, Charlotte, and Martinsville are the Chase within the Chase.

True to his humble nature, Johnson is taking nothing for granted. "I really don't want to fall into a false sense of security and think that because we have run well here in the past that we're going to come back and have it again," he told reporters Friday at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, Calif. "You have to come back and prove yourself every qualifying session and every race so it makes the week easy coming in, but as soon as those engines fire and we roll out for practice this morning, all of that disappears and it's about the now. That's what I'm focused on and I think the experience over the years has helped me with that. We'll just go out and do all we can."

As is usually the case with Johnson, his timing is perfect. He arrives at Auto Club, where he won in February, on the heels of back-to-back strong showings on intermediate tri-ovals. "So much has gone on from a technical standpoint with the race cars that I'm optimistic, but at the same time I know that once we get out here, it's going to be a different set of circumstances than what we've seen in the past," he said. "I do have a lot of confidence in how we ran at Atlanta and then again last weekend in Kansas, and think that we're going in the right direction with our setups and making our cars more competitive on these big tracks."

You want numbers? How about the fact that Johnson has won five times in 15 career starts at Fontana, including three of the past four, and hasn't finished lower than ninth there since 2006. Then there's Charlotte, where he's won six times in 18 starts, and in his full-time Cup career has finished outside the top 10 only four times (granted, one of those was this past May, when he got loose and crashed). Then there's Martinsville, unquestionably his best track on the circuit, where he's won six times and posted 16 top-10s in 17 career starts. His winning percentage on those three venues combined is an insane 17-for-50, or .340. In terms of top-five finishes, that batting average rises to .620.

That's the gantlet everyone else has to run if they want to dethrone Jimmie Johnson. Sure, the point margins now are very manageable, and nothing is guaranteed. Everyone says it's the closest Chase ever. But the margins have been manageable before. They said it was the closest Chase ever last year. And Johnson has used this very stretch to separate himself from the competition, and make that feared (and occasionally overdramatized) Talladega race something of a non-factor on another championship romp toward Homestead. Can he do it again? We don't need 10 races to tell us. Three will be enough.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.