Johnson just wants to avoid trouble on track

FORT WORTH —  Jimmie Johnson can’t quite clinch another championship in Sunday’s NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Texas Motor Speedway, but he certainly can make the title chase more compelling.

Not that he wants to.

With only three races left in the season, starting with the Dickies 500 at the 1.5-mile TMS oval, Johnson has a comfortable 183-point lead in the Cup standings over Carl Edwards.

If Johnson merely keeps his No. 48 Chevrolet near the front, he’ll probably waltz toward his third consecutive title in the final two races at Phoenix and Homestead-Miami.

The El Cajon, Calif., native would join Cale Yarborough as the only drivers to earn the three-peat. Yarborough did it 30 years ago.

But if Johnson runs into Texas-size trouble here, that could tighten NASCAR’s Chase for the Cup playoff and give Edwards and third-place Greg Biffle (185 points back) a fighting chance.

“At this point it’s pretty much all or nothing,” Edwards said. “If we can catch Jimmie on a day where he has some trouble . . . we have to be there getting the most amount of points.”

Qualifying is today to set the 43-car field for the 334-lap race.

Edwards is a two-time winner at Texas, including this year’s spring race in April. The Missouri native, who drives the No. 99 Ford for Roush Fenway Racing, has seven wins this season, including last Sunday’s race in Atlanta.

Biffle, his teammate in the No. 16 Ford, also won at Texas in 2005. But the track has given Biffle fits at times, and his average finish here (26.1) is the worst among the 12 drivers in the Chase.

Johnson, meanwhile, has the highest average finish (8.5) and he’s the defending champion of the Dickies 500. Texas was part of his remarkable title run last year, when he won four of the final five races.

And he has no intention of playing it safe at this point.

“Until I have that trophy, in my mind I can’t loosen up on things,” he said after storming through the field late in the race to finish second to Edwards at Atlanta. “I just got to keep my head down and keep working for this.”

For several other drivers, Texas is the next opportunity to salvage a disappointing season.

Jeff Gordon, the four-time Cup champion who is sixth in this year’s Chase, is still looking for his first win in more than a year.

The last time Gordon -- Johnson’s teammate at Hendrick Motorsports -- went winless for a full season was his rookie year in 1993. But Texas hasn’t been friendly to Gordon: It’s one of two tracks where he has never won (Homestead-Miami is the other).

Matt Kenseth, another Roush Fenway driver and the 2003 series champ, also hopes to score his first win of the season at Texas. If he comes up short Sunday and in the final two races, his six-year streak of winning at least one race in a season will be broken.

And Kyle Busch? A win at Texas would give the Joe Gibbs Racing driver nine victories this season and a shot to finish the season with 10 or 11 wins.

That would offset what has otherwise been a disastrous Chase for Busch. Despite his eight wins in the 26-race regular season, he’s last among the dozen drivers in the 10-race Chase, a whopping 465 points behind Johnson.

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james.peltz@latimes.com