Jimmie Johnson embracing run at history

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Jimmie Johnson pauses and stares down at his bare forearm.

“I got the goose bumps again.”

At 41 and with a record-tying seven championships in NASCAR’s premier series, Johnson has accomplished much and been touched by tragedy deeply but does not easily attribute either to fate or providence.

The same applied when he was a six-time series champion, plying the final laps of the 2016 season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway. At the end of a race in which he had begun at the rear of the field, advanced but languished on the periphery of glory, a series of late cautions — including one that absorbed title hopefuls Carl Edwards and Joey Logano — gave him the chance to fulfill a destiny he never would have thought possible.

Johnson’s mind, amid the blur of track lights and the grunt of his No. 48 Chevrolet as it drew away from the field, was drawn to the little signs — “spiritual stuff,” he calls it — that suddenly seemed like puckish hints.

Johnson had advanced to the final by winning at the performance and emotional epicenter for Hendrick Motorsports that is Martinsville Speedway. He has claimed victory there nine times. The track also is near the site of a 2004 plane crash that claimed 10 lives, including that of team owner Rick Hendrick’s son, Ricky. Soon after Johnson’s latest win there, in October, he launched the hashtag brand for his title pursuit #se7en, linking the bid with one of the numbers his friend, Ricky, had used in his racing career.

But it was at Homestead that Johnson became a believer.

“I was never raised that way,” Johnson told USA TODAY Sports, leaning forward to rest elbows on knees outside his motor coach at Daytona International Speedway. “I was raised to go out and work for it and you create your own luck. (Crew chief Chad) Knaus firmly believes you create your own luck. I’m aware and I think we all have different moments in life where fate intervened or maybe, ‘That was supposed to happen.’

“But that’s not a normal line of thought for me. But there were these little signs from Martinsville that would pop up, and I would be like, ‘Nah, nah.’”

Johnson’s cadence slows as he narrates the final three laps, where he took the lead with three laps left, then held off Kyle Larson on a final restart to win for the first time at the South Florida track.

“I get the lead from Kyle Larson on the back straightaway,” he recalled, “head-to-toe the most intense goose bumps I’ve had my entire life and, I don’t know, I was like, shivering in the car and I’m like, ‘Holy (expletive), this was meant to be.’ Clear as day. That doesn’t happen. I’ve never had an experience like that.”

Johnson doesn’t know if it will happen again. And he can’t know, he said, if it will compare to what would be a record-setting eighth title, a quest he begins Sunday in the Daytona 500 (2 p.m. ET, Fox).

Entering yet another title defense in a reconfigured points format — “I think all my hardcore fans think it’s a shot at me, and I know it’s not,” he said with a smile. “But it’s funny.”

He said he cannot be considered a title favorite, just as he couldn’t have been entering the championship race last season after a year that was modest by his team’s exemplary standards.

He wants an eighth title. There will be another hashtag campaign to trumpet it, and it’s a “journey.” He said he will enjoy, whether it happens this year or another. If it doesn’t, Johnson said he will remain content.

“The burning desire is there for its own reasons,” he said. “But if I don’t get it, it won’t define my career.”

It certainly won’t. A driver who grew up in El Cajon, Calif., racing motorcycles and trucks in the desert, Johnson said his career aspiration upon joining Hendrick as a rookie in 2002 was one Cup win. He enters this season with 80, which is best among active drivers and seventh all-time.

And if he doesn’t get No. 8, the moment on pit road with Hendrick three months ago will become even more poignant. Hendrick said the defining pass for the win came so suddenly that he hardly had a chance to become nervous or excited. When he reached Johnson and heard his story, Hendrick said, “My knees went weak.”

“I didn’t know how he felt until it was over and when I walked up to the car,” Hendrick told USA TODAY Sports. “He said something, and it just … I had this chill that ran all over me. … Jimmie’s not the kind of guy to get emotional about something like that, but when I got to him, he was overwhelmed about his feeling.

“He said ‘Ricky rode with me.’ He was telling me, ‘I said, come on, buddy, we can do this.’ It just made that deal so special to (wife) Linda and I that he experienced that and he’s remembered him. That was really something.”

Goose bumps, again.

Follow James on Twitter @brantjames

PHOTOS: BEHIND THE WHEEL WITH JIMMIE JOHNSON