With Atlanta win, is Jimmie Johnson the early title favorite?
Last season, Jimmie Johnson needed 12 races to get to Victory Lane. He went on to finish a career-worst 11th in the standings, despite winning three more times.
This season, Johnson needed just two starts to pull into the Winner's Circle. Does that make him the early favorite to capture the 2015 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series title?
Although it's way too early to anoint Johnson, Daytona 500 winner Joey Logano or anyone else as the odds-on bet to win it all, this much is certain: Johnson, a six-time Sprint Cup Series champion in pursuit of a record-tying seventh title, is off to a fast start.
Also, history reveals that when Johnson and his No. 48 Chad Knaus-led team start well, they are prone to keep the pressure coming -- oftentimes all the way to a championship.
How confident is Johnson that this could be his year to tie Richard Petty and the late Dale Earnhardt as the Sprint Cup Series' only seven-time champions?
Well, he's not getting ahead of himself -- especially with the unpredictable nature of the winner-take-all, one-race championship format -- but Johnson is clearly feeling good about the current state of affairs in the No. 48 camp after leading 92 of 325 laps en route to Sunday's triumph.
"I definitely think it gives you a sign who's going to be competitive," he said after Sunday's Atlanta race. "This track is a little unique with how much tire falloff that we have. This does a lot for us. We feel really good about coming here and having this kind of showing. I think what we did here we can take to a lot of the racetracks ahead."
With his Atlanta win, the Hendrick Motorsports driver is all but guaranteed a berth in the 16-driver Chase for the Sprint Cup, which for only the second year will consistent first of regular-season race winners, followed by the next highest drivers in points who don't have a win.
"It takes pressure off in some ways," Johnson said. "We don't have the questions of, 'Are you going to win this year?' and the stuff that is from the fans and what goes on in here (the media center). It's nice to dodge that.
"It's nice to know we're locked into the Chase. There's a lot of good things that come with it. We're pumped, excited, and looking forward to going racing next week."
This weekend's venue, Las Vegas Motor Speedway, is a place where Johnson has triumphed four times in 13 starts. His last victory in Sin City came in 2010.
But Sunday's Kobalt 400 will be the first race at Las Vegas with the new lower-downforce, lower-horsepower 2015 rules package that made its debut in Atlanta.
Johnson expects LVMS -- a 1.5-mile track cut from the same mold of many tracks where the Sprint Cup Series will compete this season -- to offer even better clues than Atlanta on where he and everyone else stacks up. Johnson also isn't willing willing to say if he believes the new rules package plays to his strengths as a driver.
"It's hard to say for sure," he said. "Texas and Atlanta, a lot of those tracks with high wear, we seem to shine at regardless of package. I think next weekend in Vegas will really be a telling sign which teams are kind of geared up for the meat of the season, what our season's based on.
"(Winning at Atlanta) doesn't hurt by any means. I'm feeling really good, but I'm not 100 percent there yet. We'll figure that out next weekend."
Knaus, the crew chief responsible for guiding Johnson to all six of his championships, shares in his driver's cautious optimism about whether the No. 48 bunch is back to its old frontrunning form after a disappointing 2014 by the team's standards.
"I just know we're going to continue to work and do the best we possibly can," Knaus said. "That's the vintage 48 methodology. If you win, you just put your head down, keep digging, try to get the next one. That's kind of how we're going to approach the season.
"Just because we won (at Atlanta) doesn't mean we're going to go to Vegas and knock it out of the park. I think we have the ability to, but I don't think there's any givens, by any stretch."
