Move to COT has helped fuel Hendrick's domination

Jimmie Johnson (right) and Jeff Gordon gave team owner Rick Hendrick (left) a dominating one-two punch this season. AP

RELATED • Johnson wins second straight Chase title

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HOMESTEAD, Fla. -- Jimmie Johnson's second straight NASCAR Nextel Cup championship coupled with Jeff Gordon's runner-up finish raises the question: can the Hendrick Motorsports express be derailed?

Johnson's Chase run intimidated not only his rivals, but also his teammate -- the usually unflappable Gordon -- coincidentally, the last NASCAR driver to put together consecutive titles, in 1997-98.

Despite six earlier championships, team owner Rick Hendrick said, "I don't think I've seen a more dominant performance since I've been racing."

Said Jack Roush, an owner of two straight championship teams, "This is a momentum sport."

It was Johnson's four straight wins that put him in a position to deny Gordon's fifth title. No one else was even close. Third place finisher Clint Bowyer was 346 points behind.

One of the reasons for such a dominant year has to do with NASCAR's transition to the Car of Tomorrow. Experts will tell you, and Roush will admit it, he got caught unprepared for the COT while Hendrick's teams were taking the new car very seriously. "There's a revolution occurring," he said. "When I started 20 years ago at this, engineering was something that was kept on the back burner." Only when a team got far behind would they ask for an engineer's opinion and even then the crew chief might laugh off those ideas.

Gary Nelson, one of the early architects of the Car of Tomorrow, said in the garage at Homestead that Hendrick's engineers were calling more than their counterparts on all of the other teams combined.

Hendrick had an entire test team with two drivers devoted to the new car: David Green, a former Busch Champion, to test on ovals and Max Papis to test on road courses.

Roush said he was lulled into complacency because of NASCAR's "laxity ... of not enforcing a testing policy that they indicated they were gonna impose on us, so I got behind there."

When NASCAR envisioned the Car of Tomorrow it was going to be the great leveler, allowing smaller teams to compete on equal footing with the big teams. It didn't work out that way because the fly in the ointment was that only the big teams could afford to fully test the new design.

"We think that with the progress we made with the Car of Tomorrow over the winter we'll be able to close any gap," Roush said optimistically. He's hired at least "five or seven" people to put together a test team to rival Hendrick's. Roush better be a little concerned

With fewer than three months to go before the season opener, Hendrick is already ramping up for 2008.

"We can't come back like we have. To be better we have to look at every area or we won't be able to compete," Hendrick said. "We've already started," working on his 2008 racers.

A word of advice to the rest of the NASCAR regulars: don't be concerned, be worried, be very worried.

Ends Key Moment

In a mirror image of last week's race in Phoenix, Martin Truex, Jr. takes two tires on a late-race pit stop, while race winner, Matt Kenseth takes four. Truex would fade to sixth after challenging for the win.

By The Numbers

This was Kenseth's second win of the year, 16th in his career. Kenseth led a race high 214 laps. ... Roush's (now Roush Fenway Racing) Fords have won the last four races at the Homestead Miami Speedway.

Suspenseful Moment

Kenseth used to tease his crew chief, Robbie Reiser, by radioing a fictional problem with the car late in the race. Before the final caution Kenseth felt a vibration and called his team. Because he's cried wolf in the past, let's say his team took his call with a grain of salt.

"They say I've got a big imagination, but I really did think it and whenever you're leading you think it. But I must have got a big piece of debris on the right-front tire," Kenseth explained. Fortunately it fell off and he wasn't bothered again.