Martin, Gordon battling for second in points

FORT WORTH, Texas -- Mathematically, Mark Martin and Jeff Gordon still have a chance to win the Sprint Cup championship.

The reality with three races left?

"We've still got a great battle going for second in points," Gordon said yesterday. "If for some crazy reason those guys had trouble, we've got to make sure we capitalize on them. Our focus right now is winning races and trying to get to second in points."

In his run for an unprecedented fourth consecutive title, Jimmie Johnson's closest chasers are his Hendrick teammates. But Johnson takes a comfortable 184-point lead over Martin into tomorrow's race at Texas Motor Speedway, with Gordon eight points further back.

Martin, already a season runner-up four times, is facing the realistic possibility of being in that spot again. His deficit increased by 66 points after an airborne crash with two laps to go at Talladega last week.

Johnson needs only to average a 10th-place finish in the last three races, or 11th if he leads at least one lap in every race, to clinch the championship. Johnson has an average finish of 3.4 in the seven Chase races so far, finishing in the top 10 in all of them.

Gordon (first) and Martin (seventh) will start tomorrow ahead of Johnson, who qualified 12th.

Johnson finished second at the 1½-mile, high-banked Texas track in April behind Gordon, who broke a 47-race winless drought. That is Gordon's only win this season, though he has 17 top-10 finishes the last 26 races.

Martin carried the points lead into the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship, then won at New Hampshire to open the final 10-race stretch. But he slipped behind Johnson after a four-race stretch in which he finished 17th in Charlotte and 28th last week at Talladega after his late crash.

In 755 career starts, Martin has 40 wins and 415 top-10 finishes. The only thing missing is a season title.

"I think he's one of the best out there still today. He's proven that this year. You put him in solid equipment, look what he can do," Gordon said. "He certainly deserves to be a champion. In my opinion, he is. But I know that nobody else is going to consider him that until he has the actual trophy. "

Gordon has four of them, but his last was won in 2001.

And unless something totally unexpected happens over the next three races, Johnson soon will be a four-time champion himself.