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FULL CIRCLE; Jimmie Johnson earns his first Nextel Cup during a surprising year.(Motorsports)
Byline: AL PEARCE
The 2006 Nextel Cup season began with an overtime finish at Daytona Beach in February and ended with an overtime finish at Homestead-Miami Speedway in November. Thirteen drivers won during the 36-race season that's jammed into 39 weekends at 22 tracks in 18 states. Four drivers led the points.
At the end, though, the most deserving team was Jimmie Johnson's and his No. 48 Chevrolet Monte Carlo SS of Hendrick Motorsports.
It won the Daytona 500 and Brickyard 400, and Las Vegas, Talladega and Martinsville. (Other than adding a road-course win, you can't find much more variety than that.) It had 13 top-fives and a series-high 24 top-10s. It was lead-lap in 25 of the first 26 races, and its only DNF came after a last-lap accident at Talladega in October. It led the standings for 22 of the first 24 races and was second to Matt Kenseth entering the third annual 10-driver, 10-race Chase for the Championship.
And its rally to win the Nextel Cup from deep in the Chase field is the thing of legend. Johnson may sound like an MBA candidate and look like a soap opera star, but never underestimate him. His comeback proves he's as hard-core a racer as anyone in NASCAR.
A wreck-related 39th place at Loudon left Johnson and crew chief Chad Knaus ninth in points, 139 behind Kevin Harvick. An uncharacteristic 13th at Dover moved them to eighth, but still 136 behind. After another uncharacteristic 14th at Kansas City, the team remained eighth, 165 points behind Jeff Burton. Some series-watchers wrote the team off after the wreck-related 24th at Talladega (while running second on the last lap) left it 156 points behind.
"It looked pretty bleak at that point,'' Johnson said several weeks later. "I went to our shop the next morning, and most of the guys were pretty bummed out. They had their heads hung pretty low. I told everybody that we still had a lot of opportunities left, that we had overcome a deficit like that before, and we could do it again. We'd been fast in all of those Chase races; it wasn't like we'd been back on our heels. I felt we could still win races and make a run at it. But I knew it wouldn't be easy. I was nervous.''
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