The Allstate 400

INDIANAPOLIS --

You knew what was up for Sunday by midday Friday, when Jimmie Johnson, in his own polite way, subtly called his Ruthian shot.

Asked if a win in the Allstate 400 would make it clear he's back, he said -- no brag, just fact -- "We're back already. I don't think we need to run this weekend to prove that." He also politely blew off questions about how hot Kyle Busch has been lately, not so much denigrating Busch's streak as implying by his tone that it just might be over … that Johnson was ready to take command of the Sprint Cup tour for a while.

"I hate flying below the radar," he said of his recent history after winning the Cup the past two years running. "I miss being booed. I miss people throwing stuff at me. I want to start winning again and go through all that stuff." Even without results to show for it yet -- he finished second to Busch at Chicagoland the previous race -- Johnson could feel his momentum of the past two seasons returning.

"We've got a lot of speed, we're qualifying up front, we're racing up front -- we're back," he said. All this, before Johnson ran so much as a practice lap at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Then Saturday, he won the pole to demonstrate the "qualifying up front." Hours later, he was fastest in final practice, showing "a lot of speed." Most of Sunday afternoon he raced up front. He dominated! Then he won, for the second time here in three years. He's back!

He breezed early, got into a bit of a fix late with a blistered tire, then staged a spectacular drive back from ninth to first. Though his tire problem looked for a moment like it might cost him the win, it was minor indeed amid the pandemic of tire failures that brought out 11 cautions. The issue was mostly right-rears blowing. And how indicative of Johnson's day was this: When his right-rear finally blew, it was during his victory burnout. The blister occurred two stops from the end, when Johnson was fighting an unexpected challenge from Denny Hamlin. He had seen little competition previously.

"The first three-fourths of the race, it seemed like we could run the pace we needed to, and pass guys and control the race," Johnson said. "But at the end, I don't know if the 11 [Hamlin] and the 99 [Carl Edwards] had been just waiting for the right time to get aggressive, but those guys really matched our pace and were tough to race with.

Just before he fell back to ninth, "I was behind the 11 and thought I could get by him, but I blistered the right-rear tire and that didn't work out." But he was saved by a mandatory competition caution NASCAR threw for tire checks. With a fresh set, "I got up to I guess second or third for that last [mandatory] pit stop [with 10 laps remaining]." Johnson and crew chief Chad Knaus had been going with four-tire stops all race -- that's why Johnson found himself behind Hamlin, who took two. But on the final stop, Knaus ordered only two tires, Johnson roared out of the pits first, and from there it was only a matter of zigging and zagging down Indy's long straightaways to break the draft on the pressing Edwards.

Though he had only one win this season coming to Indy, Johnson had seen his team gaining momentum lately without the results to show for it, and "that's where that confidence came from," he said of his Friday talk. "We've known we've been doing the right things; we could see the momentum. We've just had a lot of races where strategy came into play and it didn't work out for us. And we didn't get the finishes we deserved. "You can look at the races," Knaus said. "Not the finishes but the races themselves over the last 10 or 12 weeks, and we've been right there. … Any racetrack we go to now, I can proudly say I think we can run top-5 speeds. If you can do that on a weekly basis, then you're going to be in position to go for a championship. "And I think we're there now."

Ed Hinton covers motorsports for ESPN.com. He can be reached at edward.t.hinton@espn3.com.