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Drew Carey was on a late-night talk show the other night, and he said some contestants on The Price Is Right try to spin the wheel exactly one turn.

They try to get it calibrated just right.

Perhaps Jimmie Johnson has gotten this three-year-old Chase format calibrated. It’s sort of like a roulette wheel. Ask Brad Keselowski and Martin Truex Jr. To paraphrase the late, great Lefty Frizzell, they’re “gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, crying won’t bring [‘em] back.”

The old Chase – it actually evolved over 10 years and then NASCAR decided it wanted a game show – was fine by Johnson. He won six of them, five in a row.

By virtue of his ninth career victory at Martinsville Speedway, a weird little paper clip that seems to mystify most others, Johnson took a trip without having to leave the farm. He’s still competing in Fort Worth and Phoenix, but as a practical matter, he’s already in the finals. He’ll be one of four racing among themselves for the Sprint Cup championship, while coping with the annoying presence of 36 others, at Homestead-Miami Speedway on Nov. 20. The other three finalists remain a matter of some dispute.

Johnson may win at Texas this week. He’s won there the past four autumns. It doesn’t matter, though. If Johnson pulls off the track on the third lap – in the old days, the drivers today derided with the term “start and park” often listed the alleged reason for their demise as “handling” – he will still go to Homestead as the favorite.

He’s Jimmie Johnson. He knows how to win championships. Even in a format that produces a high-stress variety of tiddlywinks.

Tiddlywinks is an indoor game played on a flat felt mat with sets of small discs called “winks,” a pot, which is the target, and a collection of squidgers, which are also discs.

That sounds like that 29-lap caution period at Martinsville to me.

Besides, Johnson’s consistency is “preternatural”: It is suspended between the mundane and the miraculous. I stole that from Wikipedia. The tiddlywinks definition, too.

What separates Johnson – and his Bond villain of a crew chief, Chad Knaus – from the rest is the fact that he doesn’t keep it simple.

Every other driver vows to “take it one week at a time.” Others say they’re going to “do what I do every week.”

Knaus thinks to himself, how stupid is that?

Is Johnson great? Is Knaus clever? Is sunshine bright? Is the election insane? Is supercalifragisticexpialidocious a long word?

What mainly sets Johnson apart is that he and Knaus have a system. The system has to change when the format does. When Milton Bradley introduced “Race Car Roulette,” it took a while to adjust.

Even though it is Johnson – and he is approximately 99 percent more likely to be “in the driver’s seat” than all the others for whom that term has ever been used – it’s no lock. The roulette wheel isn’t rigged. Stuff happens. Things break. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong … (Ecclesiastes 9:11).

That’s the way to bet, though.