CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) – Singed eyelashes were the least of Jimmie Johnson’s problems after a fiery crash knocked him out of the race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

The race roared on without the defending Nextel Cup champion, and if his luck doesn’t change real soon, so will the Chase for the championship.

It was the second consecutive DNF for Johnson, who has dropped from fourth to ninth in the season standings the past three races. With only six races to go before the Chase field is set, Johnson knows he has a perilous hold on his spot inside the top 12.

“We’ve squandered away a lot of points here in the last month or two with these poor finishes,” Johnson said.

When asked on a scale of 1-to-10 how worried he was about not making the Chase, Johnson said he was “about a seven.”

It wouldn’t be unprecedented for the champion to be ineligible to defend his title. It happened to Tony Stewart just last year, when a summer swoon knocked him out of the Chase.

But it’s hard to imagine Johnson, the most consistent driver in NASCAR the past three seasons, in this sort of predicament.

Johnson and his Hendrick Motorsports have dominated the 26-race “regular season” since 2004, when he ranked no lower than second in the standings for 18 straight weeks. In 2005, he spent 23 of the first 26 races ranked in the top three, and the lowest he dropped to in 2006 was third – once – through the entire regular season.

He’s not been this low in the standings since the fourth race of the 2004 season, a span of 74 regular-season events. As he heads into Sunday’s race at Pocono Raceway – where he finished 42nd in June – Johnson leads 12th-place Dale Earnhardt Jr. by just 252 points.

Johnson and teammate Jeff Gordon opened the season as the top two drivers, and it wasn’t too long ago that he seemed a shoo-in to win a second straight title. He won four of the first 10 races this season, stashing away 10 bonus points a pop to use in his seeding when the Chase begins.

But Gordon, who also has four victories but hasn’t been to Victory Lane in six races, has maintained his spot on top of the standings. Johnson, winless for 10 races, is free-falling.

“Somebody I feel bad for right now, honestly, is Jimmie Johnson,” Stewart said. “This guy can’t buy a break.”

Indeed, accidents, blown tires, and broken parts have sabotaged races that started with strong runs. Without a handful of bad breaks, Johnson would be near the top of the standings.

That knowledge has helped him keep his No. 48 team focused, and he had lunch with the crew Tuesday to remind them what a good job they’ve been doing.

“If we were running 30th each week I’d say, ‘OK, we don’t have our stuff together,’ ” he said. “But to be in this position because of tires blowing and a couple of mechanical issues and being caught up in wrecks and different things, that’s a harder pill to swallow.

“It’s also something I’m going to use to motivate my guys. We don’t need to change anything. We’ve been competitive. We have great race cars. It’s just bad racing luck, and we can’t lose focus on how good of a team we have and let that affect the way we approach these last few races before the Chase.”

Johnson’s slide has coincided with crew chief Chad Knaus’ six-race suspension, which began July 1 in New Hampshire. Knaus, who was caught manipulating what he believed to be a gray area in NASCAR’s design of the Car of Tomorrow, is eligible to return Aug. 19 in Michigan.

In the four races Knaus has missed, Johnson has been fifth, 10th, 37th and 39th. But Johnson is hesitant to pin his misfortune on Knaus’ absence.

“Certainly, we can’t wait to have him back and he adds a great deal of leadership at the track and to the set up of the car and all those things,” Johnson said. “But if we really rate ourselves on how we’ve performed without Chad, we’ve had very competitive cars. We haven’t lacked anything in competitive spirit and competition on track.

“We just don’t have the finishes to show for it.”

AP-ES-08-01-07 1052EDT