A close championship battle, the kind that helped build NASCAR’s popularity in the 1980’s and 1990’s, is upon us once more. It’s nothing new to have two Hendrick Motorsports drivers facing off against one another given Jeff Gordon’s down-to-the-wire fight with Terry Labonte in 1996. The twist is the Chase format.

If the Latford system that served so well in the previous two decades was still in place, Jimmie Johnson would be trailing Jeff Gordon by 400 points with two races remaining and would have already clinched the title. The old system favored consistency. The new one favors victories during the final 10 races of the season. Not a bad formula given the showdown in Texas during the closing laps between Johnson and Matt Kenseth, which brought winner Johnson 15 additional points as well as momentum.

It’s too early to write off Gordon even given Johnson’s three straight victories. Texas has not been Gordon’s favorite place to race after his heavy crash into the concrete in Turn 4 in 1999 — the first major moment of his career that ended with the wall having the upper hand. As it was, Gordon pronounced himself grateful on Sunday to be leaving Ft. Worth with a seventh-place finish headed into what he regards as the friendlier climes of Phoenix and Homestead.

But the outcomes in the final two races remain less than certain whatever the earlier performances by these two drivers on those tracks. Stuff happens when the points race gets this tight between two capable teams. However they arrived at this crossroad, either crew can suddenly find new ways for things to go wrong.

Labonte nearly lost his title after hitting the wall in Phoenix during practice — and breaking his hand in a freak incident with the steering wheel. The tough Texan hasn’t been able to look at a hyperdermic needle ever since those cortisone injections needed to run the final two races in order to nip Gordon.

Awesome Bill Elliott from Dawsonville and Melling Racing collapsed down the stretch in 1985, to cite an instance when things didn’t work out. Divorce procedings by Junior Johnson and Associates, i.e. Johnson and wife Flossie, proved to be distracting when Elliott again lost down the stretch in 1992. At North Wilkesboro, of all places, the team missed the handling on the chassis by a country mile, opening the door for Alan Kulwicki and Davey Allison.

Bobby Allison needed to lose it two years running before narrowly clinching the title at Riverside in 1983 — despite the sabotage of his fuel by someone who figured out how to get sugar into one of the DiGard Racing team’s dump cans during the race. DiGard really blew its first chance to win the title when the team decided to use a conservative gear for Darrell Waltrip at Ontario in 1979 to avoid a blown engine — then didn’t have enough power to recover from a mistake early in the season’s final race. That paved the way for Richard Petty’s seventh championship.

Gordon may have headed down a similar errant, conservative path this year. In Atlanta, he said the driver and team that commits the fewest mistakes would win the title. So he may have been driving too defensively. In Atlanta, Johnson declared that he would try to win the most races and lead the most laps, a decidedly different approach. On the other hand, after Texas Johnson is now suddenly in the lead by 30 points and might be tempted by the lure of points racing.

Given their lifestyles, it seems unlikely that anything off the track will interfere with the championship aspirations of either Gordon or Johnson. Neither one has ever been known to break a curfew or use expletives over the public address for that matter, although Johnson fell off the roof — of a golf cart — during the post-season last year after winning the championship and broke his wrist.

There’s always the sheer luck factor. Had Kurt Busch’s wheel disengaged a few moments later, he would have missed the pit road entrance at Homestead in the first year of the Chase and lost a lap or two — as well as the title.

There are other things that can go wrong. But let’s not even think about the room of doom factor, e.g. one or the other of the championship aspirants gets caught with the wrong post-race ride height. (A lot of folks seem to think Mark Martin lost a title by a post-race decision in February of 1990 at Richmond that cost his Roush Racing team points. But that really falls under could-a, should-a, would-a since it occurred so early in the season.)

In any event, a betting man would have a difficult time laying odds at this stage on either Johnson or Gordon. Given the amount of money and prestige on the line, I would expect the unexpected.

Jonathan Ingram can be reached at jonathan@jingrambooks.com.