The Big 3

It's easy to forget sometimes what NASCAR's really about. Amid all the fan-friendly hoopla and relentless merchandising, the hyping of a driver's personality over performance, the goofy television commercials, the elaborate sponsor-logo paint jobs and the Hollywood tie-ins (Is Ricky Bobby a real driver?), the essence of the sport-- America's best drivers racing all out, side by side from February through November--gets obscured. With just over two months to go before the green flag drops on the Chase for the Championship, it's time to return the spotlight to where it belongs: the track. � That's where Jimmie Johnson, Matt Kenseth and Tony Stewart--each in the prime of an exceptional driving career--have displayed a championship-caliber mixture of speed and resiliency week in and week out. They are the Big 3 of 2006, and over the next five months their dash for the Nextel Cup should shape up to be one of the most compelling in the sport's history. � Fittingly, each represents one of the three powerhouse teams of NASCAR-- Hendrick Motorsports ( Johnson), Roush Racing (Kenseth) and Joe Gibbs Racing ( Stewart)--which combined won 10 of the last 11 Cup titles. Through the first 15 races this season the Big 3 together had won six races and led 34.8% of the 4,779 total laps; they were also first ( Johnson), second (Kenseth) and sixth ( Stewart) in the points standings. Stewart, the defending Nextel champion, lost ground because of a broken shoulder he suffered in a May 28 crash at Lowe's Motor Speedway but overall had been far more dominant than his standing indicated.

A handful of other drivers were in a bunch with the Big 3-- Kasey Kahne (third in the standings), Dale Earnhardt Jr. (fourth), Mark Martin (fifth) and Greg Biffle (10th, and closing fast)--but it's going to take a huge run by one of them to overtake Johnson and Kenseth, and hold off Stewart, the drivers who are generally acknowledged in the Cup garage as three of the top four talents of their generation. (The other, four-time Cup champion Jeff Gordon, has been hampered by his car's poor handling in traffic over the past two seasons.)

"This season reminds me of when I was battling [David] Pearson and [ Bobby] Allison back in the '60s and '70s for championships," says Richard Petty (box, page 74), NASCAR's alltime winningest driver. "When you have three guys gunning for the title, it pushes you to another level. Every week you've got to rise to the occasion, because you're always looking over your shoulder. That's the challenge in front of Jimmie, Matt and Tony now. And, man, they can't lose their momentum. Like in football, momentum is everything in NASCAR."

When Petty won the championship in 1974, he, Allison and Pearson combined to win 19 of the season's 30 races. The top few drivers of the late 1960s and early '70s battled for the lead in races almost every week. Today, because of the ever-increasing parity in NASCAR--six different drivers won the first eight races of the season--no threesome can be expected to conduct its own private race ahead of the field. That said, it's worth noting that 10 times in the first 15 races of 2006, at least two members of the Big 3 finished together in the top five. When Kenseth won at Fontana in February, Johnson was second; one race later, in Las Vegas, they swapped spots; three weeks after that Stewart won at Martinsville and Johnson was third; at Talladega, it was Johnson first and Stewart second.

Says Sterling Marlin, a 30-year Cup veteran, "It's not surprising that everyone else is chasing these three. You've got two former champions [Kenseth and Stewart] and a guy who probably should have at least one championship [ Johnson]. Plus, they're on the three best teams, so they have great equipment. It's looking like it's going to be a good ol' shootout between them."

Jimmie Johnson vividly recalls the sickening sound he heard at Homestead last Nov. 20, the pop that meant his charge to that elusive first championship was over. On Lap 124 of 267 in the season finale, Johnson, who has a master mechanic's sense when it comes to diagnosing problems with the car, realized that he was losing air in his right-rear tire. He radioed his crew chief, Chad Knaus, telling Knaus that he should pit immediately and take on four new tires. At the time Johnson, who trailed Cup leader Stewart by only 52 points entering the race, had fallen to 28th, but Stewart was running anywhere from 13th to 16th; Johnson knew that if he could recover and win and Stewart finished lower than ninth, Johnson could steal the title. But Knaus, not wanting to give up valuable track position, told Johnson to keep racing. Reluctantly, Johnson followed orders. But a few moments later--pop--the tire blew and Johnson smashed into the wall in Turn 4. He was through for the night.

"That team panicked in Homestead," says Speed network analyst Jimmy Spencer, a longtime racer. "They've got to be more mature if they're going to win the title this season."

Within a few hours after Stewart finished 15th at Homestead and sewed up his second championship, rumors started circulating that Johnson wanted Knaus fired for keeping him on the track. Knaus, one of the most innovative crew chiefs in NASCAR, eventually called Johnson, and the two cleared the air--a conversation that might soon be remembered as the start of their march to the 2006 title. "Everything got blown out of proportion," says Johnson. "I didn't want Chad fired. But that experience of being so close has made us more hungry and more focused this year."

For the third consecutive year Johnson, 30, was the most dominant driver of the first half of the season. After winning NASCAR's Super Bowl, the Daytona 500, he added 11 more top 10 finishes in the next 14 races. But can Johnson and Knaus sustain that success over the second half? In 2004 and '05 the team's performance fell off dramatically in the races leading to the Chase, costing the number 48 car its all-important momentum. Last year, for example, Johnson was the points leader through 20 events but then crashed in the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis on Aug. 7; he finished 38th that day and surrendered the points lead to Stewart. The crash triggered a teamwide meltdown with Johnson failing to finish higher than 16th in the three events leading into the Chase and never regaining his early-season form. (He wound up fifth in the points standings.)

"I started to feel stressed as the Chase grew near last season, and that hurt our team," says Johnson. "There were just so many demands on me that I let it affect me--but I'm not going to allow that to happen this year. We're going to bring our best cars to those last 10 races, and I'm going to try to reel off top fives and not have any DNFs. To me, this really, really feels like our year."