Almost. But not quite there.

Johnson moved inches closer to his record-tying third consecutive NASCAR title Sunday, trouncing the field at Phoenix International Raceway to deliver a knockout punch to Carl Edwards’ championship hopes.

Johnson needs to finish only 36th or better next week in the finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway to join Cale Yarborough (1976-78) as the only drivers in NASCAR history to win three titles in a row.

“He’s doing something pretty special,” said 2004 champion Kurt Busch, who finished second. “It’s just tough to beat.”

Impossible, actually.

Johnson came into Phoenix on the ropes — reeling, almost — after a sub-par 15th-place finish last week at Texas allowed Edwards to take a sizable bite out of the points lead. Johnson rebounded to win the pole at Phoenix, but struggled through Saturday’s final practice to send his stress-level through the roof.

As Chad Knaus worked late into the night on a new setup and strategy, Johnson harassed him with phone calls that didn’t stop until the crew chief ordered the driver to leave him alone.

“The first thing, the garage opens at 8:01, and he calls me right away,” Knaus said. “I was like, ‘Dude, leave me alone. I need to go to work.’ I told him to go back to sleep, you’re bothering me.”‘

Whatever changes they made worked, as Johnson led a race-high 217 of the 313 laps to stretch his lead in the standings from 106 points to an almost insurmountable 141.

“This is what I’ve worked my whole life for,” Johnson said. “We’ve got a great points lead. We’ll go down to Homestead and try to wrap this baby up.”

The win was his third in a row at Phoenix, and had Edwards on the edge of conceding after his own fourth-place finish.

“If he would have some terrible luck in Homestead, we still have a chance,” Edwards said. “We did the best we could, but it’s too big of a spread right now. It’s possible. Not probable, but possible.”

No, it’s not. Not with the way Johnson is running.

Johnson has made a mockery of Chase for the Championship format, reeling off 14 wins in the 49 races since NASCAR adopted the format in 2004. He contended for the title in 2004 and 2005, only to come up just short both seasons.

He’s on the verge of joining Yarborough, David Pearson, Lee Petty and Darrel Waltrip as a three-time champion. Jeff Gordon, his Hendrick Motorsports teammate, has four titles and Dale Earnhardt and Richard Petty won a NASCAR-record seven.

Johnson has done it in dominating fashion. He has finished in the top 10 in seven Chase races and his lowest finish was the 15th last week at Texas.

But he still had a sizable lead over Edwards, and could have clinched Sunday. So his throng of friends of hometown El Cajon, Calif., made the trip to Phoenix and crowded his pit box to watch him tick off the laps. When he passed Jamie McMurray on a late restart, his friends — which included professional baseball players Brian and Marcus Giles — pumped their fists in celebration.

Johnson started from the pole but gave way to McMurray on the first lap. He didn’t take the lead until Lap 81, but was never challenged from there.

McMurray briefly moved out front again after a round of late pit stops, but Johnson blew past him in Turn 2 off a restart and was hardly challenged again. Busch made a brief run at him in the closing laps, but graciously settled for second and praised Johnson for his skillful late pass.

“I was third and the way that he went high, went low, and he was in the lead before you could snap your fingers,” Busch said. “It was unbelievable to watch that type of display, and it’s something pretty special.”

McMurray was third, followed by Edwards, Denny Hamlin, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Kevin Harvick, Kyle Busch, Jeff Burton and David Ragan.

With the win, cash-strapped General Motors wrapped up its 32nd NASCAR manufacturer’s championship.

Hookscenter.com wire report.

If Jimmie Johnson three-peats as Sprint Cup champion, he might do it in a throwback way that borders on metaphysical.

There were times under the old Cup points system when, standings aside, you could sense a championship in the making because a driver seemed to be leading a charmed existence.

It was sort of Murphy’s Law in reverse: Nothing that could go wrong did.

The most dramatic example was Bobby Labonte in 2000, because what could have gone wrong was that he could have been killed.

He came very close. His throttle stuck during a practice session for the Southern 500 at Darlington. His car was destroyed as it slammed into the bare concrete wall.

Adam Petty and Kenny Irwin Jr. had been killed that season in very similar crashes that began with stuck throttles. This was before the HANS was accepted, and before the SAFER barrier was even developed.

What saved Labonte was the angle at which his car hit the wall — slightly different at Darlington from the way Petty and Irwin had hit at New Hampshire.

Labonte went to a backup car, which wasn’t as good, and had to work hard just to be decent in the Southern 500.

Late in the race, just after the front-runners had pitted under caution and Labonte inherited the lead, a rainstorm ended the race. Labonte won.

You had a pretty good idea then and there that nothing was going to stop Bobby Labonte from winning the 2000 Winston Cup.

Until now, there has been no such phenomenon under the Chase format. And no, Kurt Busch’s broken wheel at Homestead in 2004 — right at the entrance to pit road so he could get repairs to save his title — doesn’t count.

That was a singular flash of luck. Not a package.

There was nothing mystical about the two titles that brought Johnson to this point, his shot at becoming the first driver to win three straight championships since Cale Yarborough capped a three-year run in 1978.

Johnson’s championship of 2006 came in a clear pattern of high finishes late in the Chase. His repeat in ’07 rode on the brute force of his team’s ability to win races, 10 in all, including four in a row late in the Chase.

Not until Talladega on Sunday did you sense some planets aligning.

Even Johnson’s underpowered car, which at the outset Sunday seemed disastrous for him, was a 3,400-pound talisman that kept him from all else that could have gone wrong.

If sheer deadliness wasn’t as much of an issue — thanks now to the HANS, the SAFER and the new car — as with Labonte’s climb back into the saddle in 2000, there was still a fear factor.

Johnson had been “worried all the way back to Friday” when Dale Earnhardt Jr. blew a tire and crashed during practice. Johnson’s angst deepened as the race unfolded, with exploding tires causing four wrecks by the halfway point, including one that left Denny Hamlin hospitalized overnight for observation.

But Johnson had no tire failures. Neither was he affected by blowouts on other cars, as teammate and fellow Chaser Jeff Gordon was when David Reutimann spun in front of him. Gordon was trying to get to Johnson to help him in the draft when Gordon got taken out.

Jimmie Johnson has squeezed through and past mayhem many times in his career.
After that, Johnson, “somehow, some way,” avoided both the big ones — the massive pileups for which Talladega is notorious.

For him, the second pileup, which took out six Chasers, was at least a triple stroke of fortune.

It’s not just that he missed the wreck while his two closest competitors in the Chase, Carl Edwards and Greg Biffle, were in it (in fact, Edwards caused it). It’s more that luck saved Johnson from his own intentions. Moments before Edwards bump-drafted Biffle too hard, and in a turn at that, Johnson had decided to stick right with those two.

They’d been hanging around the back of the pack, and when they decided to go toward the front for the finish, “I thought, if I follow these guys … if we wreck, at least we all wreck together,” Johnson said.

He’d come to Talladega 10 points ahead of Edwards and 20 ahead of Biffle. If he’d wrecked with them, he’d have left in the same shape or worse. As it was, he left 72 and 75 ahead of them, respectively.

“They go forward, hooked up bumper-to-bumper on the outside, three-wide, we’re just passing people; I’ll stick with it,” Johnson said. “As we went off into three, whatever happened took place.”

Most amazing, considering all the traffic behind them, “I was very lucky not to have anyone following me too close into three, because when I jammed on the brakes, no one hit me from behind. If somebody had, I would have been collected in it — it would have been over.”

Next came a key decision when the red and caution periods caused by that big one ended with 10 laps to go. Would Johnson ride it out carefully, and accept his phenomenal luck to that point, or would he push it?

At Talladega, you don’t need the best car to win if you get the right shove at the right moment. So would he try to lay another 50 points each on Edwards and Biffle, and go maybe 125 ahead? That wouldn’t be a lock, but it would be a license to run cautiously in the rest of the Chase.

The Chevrolet Talisman — I mean Impala — took control of the situation again, letting the combatants for the win get away.

And that was the crown-jewel stroke of luck in Johnson’s day.

Had he gunned for the win, he might have suffered the same fate as rookie Regan Smith, who crossed the finish line ahead of declared winner Tony Stewart. Smith not only was denied the win but was penalized all the way back to 18th by NASCAR for passing below the yellow line.

Johnson “without a doubt,” he said, would have made the same move in the same situation as Smith. Johnson had heard the same rumor Smith had Sunday morning.

“Like wildfire, it went through the garage area,” Johnson said. Word was that on the last lap, “when you could see the flagman, anything goes.”

But NASCAR never made that official. So something else that could have gone wrong for Johnson didn’t.

As for the old line that you’d rather be lucky than good, there has never been doubt that Johnson’s No. 48 team is very, very good. Chad Knaus remains at the pinnacle as NASCAR’s best crew chief, at both calling races and preparation, with virtually unlimited resources from Hendrick Motorsports.

But now they’re lucky and good. Which is why, although the points don’t yet make it a lock, I sense three-peat.