Martinsville (Va.) Speedway is the place where Jimmie Johnson started his four-race winning streak a year ago on his way to his second consecutive championship.

As rain fell Friday and wiped out qualifying, putting the points-leading Johnson on the pole for the second week in a row, the drivers closest to him in the Chase for the Sprint Cup wondered if a third straight title was almost a foregone conclusion.

"I don't know where Jimmie gets his horseshoes," Carl Edwards said, "but he's got amazing luck, and they do everything right, so we just have to hope for something strange to happen."

Edwards and everyone else know, though, that time is running out.

After today's Tums Quikpak 500 on NASCAR's shortest, trickiest track, only four events remain, and Johnson will be the defending race champion in three of them.

Tony Stewart, who has won two titles, said Saturday it's difficult not to look at what Johnson has accomplished the past three seasons and simply marvel.

"It's hard to win it once," Stewart said of the championship, which he won in 2002 and 2005. "To win it two years in a row is extremely hard, and to just be in a position where you have the opportunity to try and win it three years in a row is unbelievable."

But Johnson hasn't opened a prohibitive lead by any stretch.

Jeff Burton is second in points, 69 behind, and Greg Biffle is third, another 17 back. After that comes Edwards, whose six victories for the season are the second most in the series, but who has finished one spot behind Johnson twice in the first five Chase races.

"I think it's 35 points a race we have to make up or something, and that's assuming that Jimmie doesn't have any bad luck," said Edwards. "I feel like all we can do now is just go race as hard as we can."

Johnny Benson passed Ron Hornaday Jr. with 46 laps left and won the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race in Martinsville, Va., on Saturday.

The win, Benson's fifth of the season, allowed him to go from 39 points behind Hornaday for the series lead to 65 points ahead when Hornaday ran out of gas with three laps to go.

Hornaday, who started on the pole, had led every lap until Benson got underneath him in turns three and four.

Championship leader Lewis Hamilton of McLaren secured pole position for the Chinese Formula One Grand Prix, earning a prime opportunity to secure the title before the last race in Brazil.

Hamilton will be the 2008 champion if he finishes on the podium in the race run early today -- it ended too late for this edition of the Star -- and gets six points more than Ferrari's Felipe Massa.

Ferrari teammates Kimi Raikkonen and Massa will start second and third.

Spain's Dani Pedrosa took the pole position for today's MotoGP Malaysian Grand Prix, turning a lap of 2 minutes, 1.548 seconds on the 15-turn, 3.4-mile Sepang circuit. Valentino Rossi, who has already clinched the series title, will start second.