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BRANT JAMESJimmie Johnson finishes eight points behind for the championship after his second-place finish.
HOMESTEAD - Jimmie Johnson's hard charge fell just short. Eight points. Or .342 seconds. Just short by any measure.
Entering the season-ending Ford 400 having won four of the past five races of the Chase for the Championship, Johnson was 18 points behind leader and eventual points champion Kurt Busch. Requiring a provisional to start 39th, Johnson's run was challenged from the start, but he was able to avoid two early accidents in the back of the field to work his way into the top 5 in the last 30 laps.
When Busch, who recovered from a tire failure midway through the race, caught up to Johnson and teammate Jeff Gordon in that same span, however, Johnson assumed his title hopes were over. Crew chief Chad Knaus, communicating over team radio, had told Johnson he needed to beat Busch by 10 spots to have a chance to win the title.
Johnson kept assuming that, even when he finished second, by .342 seconds to Greg Biffle, because Busch had rallied to finish fifth.
"It was a pretty easy scenario," he said. "I needed to beat Gordon and have quite a bit of distance between myself and Busch. With Busch on my bumper, I knew the championship was out of the question."
That wasn't actually the case. According to NASCAR scoring officials, if Johnson had been able to run down Biffle and no other driver positions had changed, Johnson would have won the title by two points over Busch.
Instead, Johnson is runnerup to a Roush Racing driver for the second straight year. If the Chase format had been adopted last year and all race results were the same, Johnson would have won the title instead of Matt Kenseth. This season, he lead the series in wins (eight) and led the standings for nine weeks only to have his season undone by two horrific wrecks early in the Chase.
Johnson finished 37th at Talladega with an overheating problem and 32nd after crashing at Kansas City, dropping to ninth, 247 points behind Busch. But Johnson rallied to win at Charlotte, Martinsville, Atlanta - the week after a Hendrick Motorsports team plane crash killed 10 friends and co-workers - and Darlington to give himself a chance.
"We're definitely disappointed that we didn't win the championship, but if you look back four or five weeks ago we weren't even in the Chase," he said. "With the loss of so many people in the October tragedy, it's amazing that we were able to have the finish that we did and to have the comeback that we did.
"I wish we could have gotten the job done but we can leave here knowing we gave 100 percent and gave everything that we could. We just came up short. We'll just come back next year and try harder."
Johnson, as usual, seemed unfazed by something out of his control.
"It was an incredible season for this whole team," he said. "We won a lot of races. That's something I'm very proud of. I set a personal goal to try to win five races this year and then to have eight and four in the Chase is pretty amazing. We were eight points away from the championship.
"I'm definitely disappointed in that, but we did all that we could. If we look back on the season and try to pick apart should-of would-ofs, it wouldn't be right to do that."
It might be just too disappointing.