Johnson not ready to cruise yet

The reigning champion has all but clinched a third consecutive crown as he heads into Sunday's race at Texas with a 183-point gap to Carl Edwards in the standings, which mean three top-ten finishes will be enough for him to secure another title.

He could even be the first driver in the five-year history of the Chase format to clinch the title before the season finale, if he manages to increase his lead by a few points after the penultimate race at Phoenix next week.

Despite that, Johnson believes that the best defence is to remain aggressive in his approach to races.

"We don't do a good job as a team sitting still," Johnson said. "We do a better job focusing on winning and staying in that rhythm of winning. I guess I've seen that in football teams where they park their starting players and come back and they're out of rhythm or whatever it may be.

"We can see that on a given run if you get the lead and you start trying to save your tyres, my own experience of when guys catch up and you try to get going again, I'm not in the rhythm, the car has changed, the track has changed and now I'm an adjustment behind.

"So in general I have found that staying aggressive and just doing what we do which is trying to win races is better for us. That's the first part. The second part is we have no clue what's going to go on these next few races."

Johnson says that even if the championship picture looks very favourable, he cannot get carried away. He insists anything can happen in any of the three remaining races and he cannot count on his luck not changing suddenly.

"Last year, using that as an example with Matt (Kenseth), those 10 or 15 points to win a race, I thought I might need them in Homestead," Johnson added. "I just didn't know what was going to play out throughout the rest of the year and I can't sit still in second spot and coast. I need to go get those points because we don't know what's going to happen.

"The same mindset is going through my mind right now. I have no clue how these next few races are going to go. The potential is there where you can lose a lot of points. I mean 34 points for a 43rd spot, that's a big swing. A lot can happen and we need to go out and get every point we can."

Johnson won a year ago at Texas and also claimed victory at the penultimate race of the season at Phoenix. He won at the one-mile oval also earlier this year, further boosting his chances of clinching the title in anticipation of the season-finale at Homestead.