Jimmie Johnson finally gets to sit in the good seats.

“Last year Rick and I were talking during the banquet,” said Johnson, referring to car owner Rick Hendrick. “We were saying, ‘This stinks, being down on the ground level. We want to be up there.'”

Up there is the main stage in the grand ballroom at New York’s historic Waldorf-Astoria hotel, the perch from which the Nextel Cup champion views NASCAR’s annual awards ceremonies.

After his first four seasons in NASCAR’s top series, Johnson watched Tony Stewart, Matt Kenseth, Kurt Busch and Stewart, again, bask in the champion’s spotlight.

“It’s a very motivating experience, to say the least,” Johnson said. “You’re sitting through the banquet and all of the things that take place during banquet week, watching the champion experience all the great things and then sit on stage.

“Anybody with a competitive spirit wants that to be them. You want to be up there getting all of the praise.”

Johnson, Hendrick and crew chief Chad Knaus are getting that praise this week, and while that center-stage moment will be the sixth championship that Hendrick has celebrated, it will be the first for Johnson and Knaus.

It’s a moment Johnson looks forward to.

“The high that you’re on from winning a race is short-lived,” Johnson said. “You go to the next race and in most cases, somebody else is the winner. But I’m the champion and no one is going to be the champion until next year this time. I get an entire year of riding this high.”

While Johnson is only 31 years old, he has made 183 career starts – the same number of Cup races Rusty Wallace had started when he won his championship in 1989. Because he’s never finished lower than fifth in the standings in his first five full seasons, it seems as though Johnson has been a championship contender forever.

“I don’t remember a year when that team hasn’t been great,” said Kenseth, who finished second behind Johnson in this year’s standings. “Ever since he and Chad got together over there, they’ve been a force, the guys to beat, really.”

The fact that Johnson and his No. 48 Chevrolets have been there year in and year out, of course, is a big part of this year’s championship story.

After opening the season with a victory in the Daytona 500, Johnson led the standings throughout much of the regular season leading up to the 10-race Chase for the Nextel Cup. But after sputtering to a 39th-place finish in the Chase opener, and then getting wrecked on the final lap of the fourth Chase race at Talladega, Johnson was 156 points out of the championship lead and, it seemed, headed for another year of only coming close.

“That was probably the low of emotions,” Johnson said of the Talladega wreck, where teammate Brian Vickers bumped Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr. out of the way to score his first career Cup win. “But still at that time no one ever said, ‘We can’t do this.’ We just kept telling ourselves, ‘This isn’t over, keep fighting, it’s not over.'”

Johnson finished second at Charlotte, then won at Martinsville and found himself right back in the middle of things. After running second at Atlanta, Texas and Phoenix, he went into the finale at Homestead ahead of Kenseth by 63 points. All he had to do in Florida was dodge disaster, and he did that easily with a ninth-place finish.

This year, Knaus was suspended for four races after a rules violation in Daytona qualifying. But Johnson won two of those races, at Daytona and Las Vegas, then added wins at Talladega and Indianapolis after Knaus returned to set up the Chase drive. The victory at Martinsville was the team’s 23rd in the past five years – more than any other team in the sport in that span.

Johnson knows that after the banquet’s festivities, a page will be turned and it will be time to get ready to try to become the first driver since Gordon in 1997-1998 to repeat as champion.

Before that, though, he plans a trip to France to race in an international competition and then a vacation to the island where he and his wife, Chandra, were married. And he’s also going to enjoy the view he’ll get from the best seats at the awards banquet.

“It’s an amazing feeling to be able to be the champion,” Johnson said.

“It’s something I always wanted to be, and I’ve worked my whole career to get to this point.

“I’m the guy for a year, and I’m going to enjoy every day of it.”