CupScene.com

(By Reid Spencer NASCAR Wire Service)

Posted: Tuesday,February 23rd, 2010

FONTANA, Calif.—If it’s better to be lucky than good, as some contend, clearly it’s best to be both.

In the eyes of their NASCAR Sprint Cup rivals, driver Jimmie Johnson, crew chief Chad Knaus and the No. 48 Chevrolet have ample supplies of both excellent performance and remarkable good fortune.

Capitalizing on an opportune caution, Johnson began the quest for his fifth straight Cup title in earnest Sunday afternoon with his fifth victory at Auto Club Speedway and the 48th of his career.

FONTANA, CA - FEBRUARY 21: Jimmie Johnson, driver of the #48 Lowe's/Kobalt Tools Chevrolet, celebrates in victory lane after winning the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Auto Club 500 at Auto Club Speedway on February 21, 2010 in Fontana, California. (Photo by Jason Smith/Getty Images for NASCAR)

Two races into his ninth full season of Cup racing, Johnson is tied with Herb Thomas for 12th on the all-time victory list.

“They’re really good, but they’re really, really lucky, too,” said Kevin Harvick, who chased Johnson for the final 20 green-flag laps on Sunday but fell short after scraping the wall. “I mean, Jimmie is a good friend of mine, but there’s no way of getting around how lucky they are.”

Harvick went on to say, bluntly, that Johnson carries a golden horseshoe where the sun doesn’t shine.

There’s no doubt Johnson turned a tough situation into Shinola after Johnson, who led a race-high 101 laps was shuffled back in the running order more than halfway through the race. Johnson brought the No. 48 Chevy to the pits for a green-flag stop on Lap 223, moments before Brad Keselowski’s Dodge spun off Turn 4 to bring out the sixth caution of the race.

Johnson beat the pace car to the scoring line at the end of pit road by approximately three seconds. Two drivers on pit road behind him, Kyle Busch and Greg Biffle, weren’t as fortunate, and each lost a lap.

As the cars circled the track under caution, preparing for a restart on Lap 231 of 250, crew chief Kevin “Bono” Manion told his driver, Daytona 500 winner Jamie McMurray, that Johnson was leading the race.

“How can he be leading?” McMurray radioed back in amazement. “He was on pit road, wasn’t he?”

“It’s the 48, man,” Manion replied.

Apparently, Johnson is as far into the heads of his competitors as the horseshoe is … elsewhere. That only increases the likelihood of a fifth championship for a team that’s already very, very good—and really, really lucky.

Oddities and anomalies

Sunday’s Auto Club 500 gave us a number of results that are outside the norm for recent years. Here are five:

Paul Menard, 18th in the standings, is the top driver for Richard Petty Motorsports. Kasey Kahne, 33rd, ranks lowest in the RPM camp, with Elliot Sadler (24th) and AJ Allmendinger (27th) also ahead of him. “I got loose and I didn’t catch it,” Kahne said of an early wreck at Fontana that relegated him to a 34th-place finish. “I did a bad job. We had a pretty good car. … I think we had a great shot at running up front, and I just made a mistake. Now we’re in a big hole.”

For the first time since Fontana got the second race of the season, starting in 2005, no driver posted a top-five finish in the Daytona 500 and backed it up with a top five in California.

Ryan Newman had one DNF last year, the result of a Nov. 1 crash at Talladega. This year, he failed to finish either of the first two races—crashing out of the Daytona 500 and blowing an engine at Fontana.

Drivers who failed to make the Chase in 2009 occupy four of the top five and seven of the top 12 points positions through two races in 2010: Harvick (first), Clint Bowyer (second), McMurray (fourth), Jeff Burton (fifth), Matt Kenseth (seventh), David Reutimann (eighth) and Joey Logano (ninth).

Juan Pablo Montoya, who didn’t have a DNF last year, suffered his first failure of an Earnhardt-Childress Racing engine Sunday and fell out of the race after 140 laps. Harvick, Burton and Bowyer, also running ECR engines finished second, third and eighth at Fontana.