Jimmy Johnson takes 2 after just 3 races!

Originally Posted by ThatsRacin.Com

LAS VEGAS - It's college basketball's buzzer-beaters that put the madness in March, but the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series came up with one of its own Sunday in the UAW-DaimlerChrysler 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
In a race that lasted just over three hours, it all came down the final seconds as Jimmie Johnson powered past Matt Kenseth off the final turn to win for the second time in three races this year.
Kenseth, who'd won the season's second race at California Speedway by holding off Johnson in a green-white-checkered finish, found himself needing to do the same thing again to cap off a day in which he'd led 146 of a scheduled 267 laps.
If the race had lasted only that long, it most likely would have been Kenseth cashing in with his second victory of the year.
"I don't think I would have caught Matt," said Johnson, who had been making up ground on Kenseth's Ford following a restart with 30 laps remaining, but still had a way to go as the laps wound down. "The caution, though, let me get right on his bumper and work out my game plan."
Kenseth was already worried about Johnson before the late caution, which came out after rookie Denny Hamlin ran into the back of Kenny Wallace's car in Turn 2 and ripped away sheet metal that went scattering across the track.
"It was weird, but with about 15 laps to go we had been holding the lead at about 1.3 or 1.4 seconds," Kenseth said. "I was getting into the gas in the same place and the car felt the same and everything, but he just started running me down."
Kenseth thought his engine might be having a problem, but admitted later that it could have been the track cooling off or just the fact that Johnson was suddenly closing in that made him think that.
"I was doing everything I could," Kenseth said.
Then came the caution, something that has been happening with curious regularity in Cup races so far this year. This was the third race and all three have been extended to overtime now under NASCAR's
green-white-checkered policy.
Kenseth thought the yellow was suspect that forced the extra laps at California, and until he got around to Turn 2 and saw the debris he wasn't particularly convinced of the validity of this one, either.
"When it came out I was hoping I could hold on for two laps," he said. "But I didn't have a real great feeling about it."
Johnson's feeling, meanwhile, was one of déjà vu.
Last year in the spring race at Atlanta, Carl Edwards edged Johnson for a victory in a last turn, last lap pass. Later in the year, Johnson turned the tables and used the same kind of move to win a race at Lowe's Motor Speedway at Charlotte.
So as the cars rode around before the last restart, Johnson was drawing up the race-winning play in his mind.
"I just thought long and hard about what I would do if I was leading and how I would try to protect it," he said. "I got a good run off Turn 2 and kind of faked to bottom. He went down to block that, and I knew that left the outside open. I was able to go up to the high side in turns 3 and 4, and once I had position alongside him he couldn't come out to protect his position."
Not without wrecking himself and Johnson that is, which if it had happened would have handed the win to Las Vegas native Kyle Busch, who finished third ahead of Kasey Kahne's Dodge behind the front two, who flashed under the checkered flag with less than a car length separating them.
The official margin of victory was 45 thousandths of a second, and nobody had to check the replay to see if a red light was off or on.
Kenseth was kicking himself in the immediate aftermath.
"Sorry, you guys deserve better than me," he said over his team's radio to a crew that had kept getting him back on track first after rapid pit stops all day.
"You guys won this race, I lost it."
A little while later, however, Kenseth wasn't quite so hard on himself. "I don't know what I could have done any different," he said.
Kenseth won here in 2003 and 2004, and led more laps Sunday that anybody has in the nine Cup races held on this 1.5-mile track that now will be reconfigured - narrowed with the turns steepened to 20-degree banking - before a Truck Series race this fall.
Now Johnson has back-to-back victories at Las Vegas, and charges forward this season with a Daytona 500 victory and the runner-up finish at California to go with Sunday's triumph, his 20th career victory.
"All day long I thinking about the points and trying to race smart," said Johnson, who leads Kenseth by 52 points atop the standings after three races. "But at the end when you're that close, all sensible thinking is gone. It just flies out of our head and you do all you can to win."