Top storylines to watch this season

Jimmie Johnson is too composed to beat himself -- so can anyone this season? Getty Images Related Links DISCUSS: Who do you think will win? ANDERSON: Junior will win Daytona 500 BEECH: Why it's Carl Edwards' year MARTIN: Five-minute guide to Daytona

Looking at it from a wide lens, things look bleak on planet NASCAR right now. As many as 1,000 in the sport have lost their jobs in the last three months, former powerhouses like Dale Earnhardt Inc. and Richard Petty Enterprises have been forced to merge with other teams to stay financially afloat, and it's probably only a matter of weeks before the Sprint Cup series fails to have a full starting field of 43 cars, something that hasn't happened since 1997. Yet if you take a close-up of what's transpiring on the track, 2009 has more compelling storylines than any other season since I started on the NASCAR beat in 2000.

As we approach Sunday's 51st running of the Daytona 500, which (you read it here first) will be won by Dale Earnhardt Jr. (I'll explain why later in the week), here are the top 10 on-track stories to watch this season.

1. JJ's bid for four
No driver in NASCAR history has won four consecutive Cup championships, but that's what Jimmie Johnson can achieve this season. What's Johnson's best attribute as a racecar driver? His mind. He makes fewer mistakes than any other driver, rarely puts himself in precarious positions, and he gets flustered only once or twice a season. Add this to the facts that he's on the sport's richest, strongest team -- Hendrick Motorsports -- and that he has NASCAR's top crew chief, Chad Knaus, sitting atop his pit box, and you have a recipe for a stock-car dynasty.

So will Johnson pull off the four-peat? Well, the schedule certainly sets up well for him. There's not a single track in the Chase on which he struggles, and in each of the past three seasons his team has peaked just as the 10-race playoff has started. This much is certain: Johnson won't beat himself. So to topple Johnson's reign, a driver will have to outperform him over the 10 weeks of the Chase and limit his mistakes to zero -- a tall, tall order.

2. Carl Edwards' time to shine
Over the 36 races of 2008 Edwards actually scored more points than Johnson, but wound up losing the championship to JJ by 69 points in the Chase. I spent a few days with Edwards this offseason for a story that's in this week's issue of Sports Illustrated, and it was clear to me that not a day went by this winter that Edwards didn't think about what it will take to beat Johnson. "I know I can do it," Edwards says. "I know we can run with the 48 team every week. My confidence has never been higher."

The key moments of the season for Edwards won't come until the Chase. He and his team made two critical mistakes during the 2008 Chase -- Edwards caused a wreck at Talladega and he suffered an ignition-switch failure at Charlotte -- that cost them the Cup. But Edwards has proven over the last two years to be the fastest driver in the series on 1.5-mile tracks, and there are six of these venues in the Chase. So if Edwards can avoid more foul-ups this fall, he should pose the biggest threat to Johnson's attempt at making history.

3. Mark Martin's last ride -- and last shot
Four times in his 26-year Cup career
Martin has finished second in the final standings. He semi-retired following the 2007 season, but owner Rick Hendrick persuaded him to sign a one-year deal for '09 by dangling the juiciest of carrots: The opportunity to drive the best equipment of his career.

Though he's 50, Martin will be a serious title contender. He's teamed with crew chief Alan Gustafson, who many in the garage regard as one of the best kept secrets in the sport, and most expect this duo to win multiple races this season. Martin is the last of the old-school generation of drivers who had to pay dues on backwater circuits for several years before reaching the Cup circuit, and he'll be a sentimental favorite all season long. Count on him being very, very fast on Sunday at Daytona.

4. Tony Stewart's great experiment
This offseason Stewart left Joe Gibbs Racing, where he won two Cup championships, to form his own team, Stewart-Haas Racing. Stewart already owns teams at the grassroots level of the sport -- in the USAC series and in the World of Outlaws series -- but he's never taken on a challenge as daunting as this.

But so far, so good for Stewart. He was able to poach some elite talent from other teams -- most notably, his crew chief Darien Grubb from Hendrick Motorsports -- and Stewart-Haas Racing will use Hendrick equipment. When Stewart announced his plans last spring, most in the sport theorized that it would take him several years to build up his team and compete for a spot in the Chase. But no one in the sport can match Stewart's force of personality and will -- think Bill Belichick behind the wheel -- and from all indications it appears that his team could compete for wins as soon as this summer.

5. Joey Logano's first year
Few rookies in the history of NASCAR have been as hyped as Logano, who this season hops into the No. 20 Home Depot Toyota that had been driven for the last 10 years by Stewart. Though Logano has yet to win a single Cup race, he's already being featured in Home Depot television ads and he's selling more merchandise than virtually every other driver in the sport not named Dale Earnhardt Jr. or Jeff Gordon.

In three Cup starts last season, Logano failed to finish higher than 28th, raising whispers in the garage that this might be too much, too soon for the 18-year-old. But he inherits most of Stewart's old No. 20 team -- one of the best in the sport -- and Stewart' s former crew chief Greg Zipadelli will be a calming influence for Logano. There's no question he has talent; four years ago Mark Martin, who's not prone to hyperbole, predicted that Logano would one day be known as one of America's greatest of all-time stock car drivers. Late last season I spent a good deal of time with Logano, his team, and his family, and my impression is this: He will eventually flourish -- and perhaps one day even win a championship -- but there will be plenty of struggles for him in 2009.

6. The pressure on Dale Earnhardt Jr.
This just in: Little E is no longer a kid. He turned 34 last October and he's now entering his ninth season of Cup racing. While he's seen many of his good friends win championships -- Tony Stewart, Matt Kenseth, Jimmie Johnson -- Earnhardt has yet to hoist a Cup at season's end to continue the legacy of his famous father, winner of seven NASCAR titles.

But this season, no question, will be his best chance to win his first championship. He's entering his second year at Hendrick Motorsports and he and his longtime crew chief, Tony Eury Jr., and now familiar with the Hendrick Way -- how the organizations tests, how it shares information, how it allocates its resources. Junior excels on short tracks and in restrictor-plate races, but he needs to improve on the intermediate tracks. Week and week out, no driver is under more pressure to perform than Earnhardt, the most popular figure in the sport today. He still has a few more prime years left in his career, but the clock is ticking.

7. The maturation of Kyle Busch
Through the first 26 races of the 2008 season, no driver was more dominant than Busch, who won eight events and entered the Chase as the No. 1 seed. But for the third straight year, Busch fell apart in the Chase, finishing 10th in the final standings. "There's an element of luck involved in racing, and I had zero of it in the Chase," Busch says. "Hopefully, this year will get all of our bad luck out of the way during the season and then come on in the Chase."

Because Busch is in his fifth Cup season, it's easy to forget that he's only 23. Throughout his career he's been prone to making heat-of-the-moment mistakes, and these have cost him dearly. If he can take a page out of Jimmie Johnson's playbook and avoid miscues at all costs -- and yes, this means not retaliating when another driver purposely tries to punt you into the wall -- then Busch should be in title contention once the green flag drops on the season-finale in Homestead, Fla.

8. Jeff Gordon's struggles
Gordon had a forgettable 2008 season. He went winless for the first time since his rookie year of 1993 and he had just 13 top-five finishes, which was eight fewer than the season before. There have been rumblings in the garage that Gordon's crew chief, Steve Letarte, could be replaced if the team struggles in the first few months of '09, but I think that would be a mistake. This is a crew chief, after all, who guided Gordon to a career-high 30 top-10s in 2007.

So what's wrong with the No. 24 team? Their biggest issue has been a poor-handling car whenever Gordon gets bogged down in traffic. He simply can't get his car to turn through the corners as fast as his competitors. No doubt, Letarte and Gordon have spent this offseason trying to resolve this issue. We'll soon find out if they have.

9. Can Richard Childress Racing break out?
The RCR drivers are known throughout the garage for their consistency and ability to finish races. Last year RCR's Jeff Burton, Clint Bowyer and Kevin Harvick qualified for the Chase, but none of them made much of an impact in the final 10 weeks of the season, failing to win a race. The reason? The RCR Chevys simply lack the straight-line speed of Hendrick Motorsports, Roush Fenway Racing and Joe Gibbs Racing.

Burton has voiced this complaint for the last two years. This offseason RCR's engine department worked in overdrive trying to find more horsepower. Was its mission accomplished? Well, if it wasn't, it likely will be another mediocre season for the RCR boys.

10. Will the quietest driver in the sport make some noise?
It's been six years since Matt Kenseth won his only championship. But I recently was talking to the King, Richard Petty, and he mentioned Kenseth as a driver who he thinks can break Johnson's stranglehold on the Cup. "The thing about Matt is, he gets absolutely everything out of his car that he can and the guy always has the car running at its best at the end of race," Petty says. "It's going to take someone like that to beat Jimmie. I'm keeping my eye on Matt."

So should you. Kenseth is like Johnson in many ways: He commits few errors; he doesn't have any enemies in the garage; he always thinks before he speaks; he excels at diagnosing problems in his car and finding speed; and he has an uncanny ability to come out of nowhere in the last 50 laps to rip off a top-five finish. I'm not saying Kenseth is going to win the championship, but he's largely being overlooked this season, which is exactly how the most soft-spoken driver in the sport likes it.

Lars Anderson can be reached at siwriters@simail.com.