Three-race swoon has Johnson spiraling in Nextel Cup standings

The race roared on without the defending Nextel Cup champion, and if his luck doesn’t change real soon, so will the Chase for the championship.

It was the second consecutive DNF for Johnson, who has dropped from fourth to ninth in the season standings the past three races. With only six races to go before the Chase field is set, Johnson knows he has a perilous hold on his spot inside the top 12.

‘We’ve squandered away a lot of points here in the last month or two with these poor finishes,’ Johnson said.

When asked on a scale of 1-to-10 how worried he was about not making the Chase, Johnson said he was ‘about a seven.’

It wouldn’t be unprecedented for the champion to be ineligible to defend his title. It happened to Tony Stewart just last year.

But it’s hard to imagine Johnson, the most consistent driver in NASCAR the past three seasons, in this sort of predicament.

Johnson and his Hendrick Motorsports have dominated the 26-race ‘regular season’ since 2004, when he ranked no lower than second in the standings for 18 straight weeks. In 2005, he spent 23 of the first 26 races ranked in the top three, and the lowest he dropped to in 2006 was third ‘ once ‘ through the entire regular season.

He’s not been this low in the standings since the fourth race of the 2004 season, a span of 74 regular-season events. As he heads into today race at Pocono Raceway Johnson leads 12th-place Dale Earnhardt Jr. by just 252 points.

‘When luck changes, you can pile up some low finishes and lose a lot of points,’ Johnson said. ‘We’ve been very fast and competitive, we’ve just had some crazy luck. I think of Stewart, and some situations he’s been through after having fast cars but bad luck. I think of Jeff Gordon.

‘This is just our turn to kind of go through that.’