All manner of statistics can be used to show how thoroughly Chevrolet teams dominated the 2006 NASCAR Nextel Cup Series. Chevrolet won 23 of the 36 points races, the most races Chevrolet has won in one season in stock-car racing history. Chevrolets led at least 30 laps in all but one of last year's Cup races. Dodges failed to lead that many laps 21 times, and Fords fell short of that threshold 14 times. Most telling, though, might be this: Only four times all year -- never in the season's final 21 points races -- did the best Chevrolet fail to finish at least second.
What that means is that Chevrolet's teams were in the hunt week in and week out, and the fact that Jimmie Johnson, Kevin Harvick and Tony Stewart each won five races helped sustain the manufacturer's conversion rate as it won a fourth straight manufacturer's championship. On the eve of a new season, it's hard to see where the gap between Chevrolet and the rest of the field, even one including a new factor in Toyota, will change in 2007. Only one team, Robby Gordon's single-car effort, defected from Chevrolet to Ford after last season, and only one 2006 race-winning driver, Brian Vickers, left the "bow-tie brigade" to jump to Toyota. In the bargain, Chevrolet picked up Mark Martin from Ford for at least a partial schedule and replaced Vickers with Casey Mears at Hendrick Motorsports. Aside from that change in the No. 25 Chevrolets and the addition of Paul Menard in a third team at Dale Earnhardt Inc., the core teams in Chevrolet's NASCAR efforts -- Hendrick, Joe Gibbs Racing, Richard Childress Racing and DEI -- return with intact driver rosters for another shot at ruling the roost.
There are challenges. In addition to the arrival of the "car of tomorrow" for 16 races, Chevrolet teams also will be phasing in a newly approved engine package along with the Impala models that will be used in those 16 events. Still, in a year where unpredictability seems to be an overriding theme in the sport, the quality and continuity of Chevrolet's top teams makes it fully reasonable to expect another season in which Dodge, Ford and Toyota will do well to win as many races as a group as Chevrolet does on its own. Johnson's 2006 championship was the culmination of a five-year drive for his No. 48 team at Hendrick Motorsports, which now tries to become the first team to win consecutive titles since it did so in 1997-98 with Jeff Gordon.
"Last year, our guys really did a good job of staying focused on the job at hand," Johnson said of the challenge of repeating. "I think we do a good job after every practice session, qualifying session, every race, at not looking at too many outside influences. It's easy for us in some respects to stay focused. We just have that ability, and that's what our team is about." It has been more than five years since Jeff Gordon won a championship in 2001, his fourth title in seven years, and although Gordon made the Chase in the No. 24 Hendrick Chevrolet in 2006, he didn't win at least three races for the first time in 11 seasons.
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