Johnson emerging as title favorite

Jimmie Johnson is the favorite to win the Chase, a distinction he also attained last year around the same time in the schedule. Getty Images

With six races left in the 2008 Sprint Cup season, history is starting to repeat itself. In '06 and '07, Jimmie Johnson began to emerge as the title favorite near the midway point of the Chase. And even though there's a month-and-a -half of racing to go this season, Carl Edwards and Greg Biffle are running out of time to catch Johnson.

If you're looking for a weakness in Johnson's 48 team or a track at which it might struggle in the next six weeks, you simply won't find anything. Johnson is a five-time winner at Lowe's Motor Speedway in Charlotte, where the Cup boys will be racing on Saturday night. He and crew chief Chad Knaus did struggle during a recent test session at Lowe's, but the team excelled a few days after that test with a victory at Kansas Speedway, which has similar characteristics to Lowe's.

After Charlotte, is Martinsville, a short track where Johnson has four career wins and hasn't finished lower than fourth in his last six starts. If Johnson finishes out of the top five at Martinsville, it'd be an upset.

So where can Edwards and Biffle make up ground on Johnson? The circuit heads to Atlanta after Martinsville. How's Johnson done here? He's only won two of the last three races at the intermediate-length track. Edwards and Biffle have excelled at these types of tracks this season, but they couldn't catch Johnson at Kansas three weeks ago, and an informal poll of rank-and-file guys in the garage last weekend revealed that nearly everyone in the sport now believes that Johnson is the driver to beat on the 1.5-mile tracks.

Performing well on these tracks is the key to winning the Chase, as four of the last six races are held at these venues,. And even though Edwards dominated at the 1.5-milers for most of the season, he's now fallen behind Johnson -- just like everyone else in the garage.

After Atlanta comes Texas Motor Speedway on Nov. 2. What's Johnson's recent record here? In his last four starts he's finished first or second three times. So if past is prologue and Johnson doesn't suffer a mechanical problem or get caught up in a wreck -- and these are two things that simply never happen to Johnson in the Chase -- you'd have figure that he should pull out a top-five finish in the Lone Star State.

The second-to-last race of the season is at Phoenix, which is a one-mile flat track. Surely Johnson must flounder here, right? Well, no. He's won the last two races at PIR, which means it likely will be extremely difficult for anyone to make up ground on him in the points here.

Then we come to Homestead-Miami for the final event of the '08 season. This is the only remaining track on the schedule at which Johnson has never won, but in the last two years he's raced conservatively at Homestead to protect his lead in the standings. In seven starts at the 1.5-mile track, Johnson's average finish is just 13.4. But this is the sister track of Kansas, so if Edwards and Biffle aren't within, say, 20 points of Johnson heading into this final race, it'll likely be game over for the Roush Fenway teammates.

"I definitely like where we're at right now in the standings," Johnson told me as we walked up pit road last Sunday at Talladega. "The Chase schedule has always set up well for us. We've still got a long ways to go, but things are starting to look good."

Yes they are. And six weeks from now, it's starting to look more and more like Johnson will be making history and becoming the first driver since Cale Yarborough, 30 years ago, to win three straight Cup championships.