Edge to Johnson in two-man race

FORT WORTH—Brad Keselowski was teammates with Jimmie Johnson for a handful of races a few years ago, and once drove a car owned by Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Johnson won an unprecedented five consecutive Sprint Cup championships before that streak ended last year. Keselowski is wrapping up only his third full season at NASCAR’s highest level and should have plenty more title chances.

They arrived at Texas with Johnson leading Keselowski in the championship chase by two points with three races to go. They race today on the 1 1/2-mile high-banked track where Johnson has 13 top-10 finishes in 18 starts with a victory five falls ago, and where Keselowski has never finished better than 14th.

So how would Earnhardt handicap the championship chase between his current Hendrick Motorsports teammate in the No. 48 Chevrolet and the friend who once drove his Nationwide Series car to consecutive third-place season finishes (2008-09)?

“Obviously, I want to see Jimmie win the championship between the two,” Earnhardt said. “But I’m really happy for Brad to be experiencing the season he has had. He has earned it. ... He is a great asset to the sport for years to go. He’s going to have a lot more opportunities aside from this one; he is going to have a lot of opportunities to win championships.”

The 28-year-old Keselowski agrees there should be plenty of other chances, but the driver of Roger Penske’s No. 2 Dodge quickly responded with a slight chuckle: “That doesn’t mean that I want to waste them,” he said.

Keselowski is trying to get the first Sprint Cup championship for Penske, who has 15 Indianapolis 500 victories and 23 national titles in different series. That includes Keselowski’s Nationwide championship in 2010 after moving from Earnhardt’s JR Motorsports, a stint during which he also ran nine Sprint Cup races for Hendrick.

“He was pretty new in the sport, eager and talented. He showed a lot of speed, a lot of potential,” Johnson said. “My relationship with Brad has really been at the track or racing-related. We haven’t had a chance to hang out too much off the track. For the longest time, he hasn’t been old enough to have a beer, so it has been hard to hang out too much.”

While he’s not really that young, Keselowski remembers first meeting Johnson when they were both running a Nationwide race for JR Motorsports in North Carolina late in the 2008 season.

During one of two rain delays that night, Keselowski went to Johnson for some advice — “because he was outrunning me” — and Keselowski felt he could spin out at any time. Johnson told him to slow down and take it easy, and make sure to finish the race.

“We went back green and there was a wreck and I slowed down to see who it was. I came back around and it was Jimmie,” Keselowski said.

“And that was my first real racing memory of him. It was him telling me to slow down and not wreck on my own. And that happened.”