Jimmie Johnson Will Probably Win The Sprint Cup Championship. Are You Gonna Watch Anyway?

The season-ending race for the NASCAR Sprint Cup will be run at Homestead-Miami Speedway on Sunday, and I wasn’t altogether sure I was going to even bother watching. The always-robotic Jimmie Johnson has all but clinched it in the points—he only needs to finish 36th to win his third consecutive championship, tying the record set by Cale Yarborough between 1973 and 1976. While that’s real great and all, watching Jimmie win anything is pretty boring—it’s always like someone has just flipped his "win" switch, and he’s going for a Sunday drive while desperate kamikaze antics erupt all around him. For him to not win, he’d basically have to DNF, and there’s no provision in Jimmie’s programming for DNFs. John is a little more sympathetic to the guy, because I guess Jimmie’s handlers had flipped his "be funny" switch for the driver’s appearance on Letterman, and John dug it. But hell, I once saw him giving a victory-lane interview when one of his crew guys came from out of nowhere and joyfully tackled him, pretty roughly, and Jimmie didn’t even pause in the delivery of the polished-sounding sentence he was spooling out. Like, didn’t even miss a beat or take a breath. That’s not nerves of steel, that’s just, my programmers forgot to flip my "remember to act like a human being in victory lane" switch. I don’t know, I guess I just feel that Jeff Hammond should be the only cyborg allowed in NASCAR, because he just does such a spectacularly awesome job of it. Can’t wait for the broadcast to return to Fox for the Daytona 500 in February!

Anyway, maybe Carl Edwards still has a chance, but it’d take a miracle (or a disaster). How about you? Gonna watch the race tomorrow?