Johnson eyes fourth Vegas win

The reigning NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion has been the man to beat at the mile and a half oval for the past three years, where he took the first of his ten victories last season on his way to clinching a second title.

Johnson, who finished second at Fontana last Monday, moving up from 27th to eighth in the points in the process, hopes Vegas sees the real start of his championship challenge.

"We've usually finished second in Fontana, left Fontana with some good thoughts, good direction, then head on over to Las Vegas and win," Johnson said. "I hope we can do that again.

"I really feel at this point of the season it's about hitting your stride. Vegas seems to be a track where we get things rolling and moving in the right direction.

"It's so early in the season and I feel like the team's trying to get into a rhythm, I'm trying to get into a rhythm, that it's not been a race that I've gone into saying, all right, we're in our stride right now and we're going to win in Las Vegas. It's just worked out that way."

The Hendrick driver believes that Carl Edwards and Matt Kenseth, as well as the Joe Gibbs Racing army, will be the main contenders this weekend. He also expects a strong challenge from Kasey Kahne, last year's polesitter at Las Vegas, and his teammate Jeff Gordon.

"In the testing that we had, the 99 (Edwards), 17 (Kenseth) and the 11, the 20 (Denny Hamlin), and the 18 (Kyle Busch) teams really kind of set the pace," Johnson added. "I think the 24 (Gordon) was close to those guys. But the 99 really stood out and the 11, I'd say, as we went to Vegas and Fontana.

"The race last weekend, it was a surprise to me to see things spread out so much up front. I expected there to be a lot more cars up there. The 99 had great pace, the 24, us, the 18 was there for the short run and the 9 (Kahne) car showed some strength."

Although Johnson has been a front-runner in the first two races of the season, as have most of his teammates, he reckons teams such as Joe Gibbs Racing have raised the bar in the engine department.

He believes Hendrick need to find more horsepower and reliability with their Chevrolet engines to close the gap shown on the dynos at Daytona, where some Toyota engines were reportedly 15 horsepower up on the best Chevrolet.

"I think we still have some room to go with our Chevrolet engines to build more power and reliability," Johnson said. "I think we were down a little bit by the numbers we saw in Daytona. But still a lot of racing left and we're still working hard to close that gap and find ourselves ahead of everybody."

Johnson has led laps in all of his six appearances at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and has won the last two events at mile and a half D-shaped ovals. This weekend's race though, will be the first for him and the Cup field with the new car at this type of track.