Around Iredell Sports

2007 Sep-10

And now there are 12

NASCAR Nextel Cup chase contenders (from left) Tony Stewart, Matt Kenseth, Jeff Gordon, Carl Edwards and Martin Truex Jr., spray the crowd with champagne after the Chevy Rock & Roll 400 at Richmond International Raceway in Richmond, Va., on Saturday. AP photo.

by Mike Mulhern
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RICHMOND, Va. - If it’s time to place bets on this year’s NASCAR championship, and if you’re banking on momentum, the men to beat certainly seem clear enough: Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart, all three in Chevrolets.

No one else starting the 12-man chase is even close.

And without Dale Earnhardt Jr. in the Nextel Cup playoffs, something certainly will be missing. The chase field was expanded from 10 to 12 for this season, to try to ensure all the sport’s big names made it.

Johnson slipped away from Gordon, Stewart and Earnhardt down the stretch here Saturday night to win the Chevy Rock & Roll 400 at Richmond International Raceway, in front of another sellout crowd of more than 112,000 at the long-running Fairgrounds track, in all-Chevy show. Little wonder Chevrolet topped the evening by clinching the NASCAR tour’s manufacturers championship.

And those four appear to be the cream of the stock car racing crop right now, though it’s still a long time between now and the Thanksgiving week finale at Homestead.

“After missing it last year, we’re excited to be back in,” Stewart said. “We never in our wildest dreams thought we would miss. But you’ve got to be on top of your game.”

Even though Earnhardt is out of the title run, he, like Stewart last year, could well be a major player in the year’s last 10 races. Earnhardt missed the playoff cut by 198 points, and blown engines were his Achilles heel. He was battling Stewart for third when his engine let go with seven laps left in the race.

There are others in the 12-man chase, and one bad race — like happened to Stewart in the very first race of the playoffs two years ago — can be devastating.

“We’re happy to be hitting our peak right now. We’re strong on all fronts, the regular car and the car-of-tomorrow,” Johnson said after his league-leading sixth win of the year.

Johnson and crew chief Chad Knaus won last year’s championship, and they dominated the first part of this season, ran dry over the summer, and just picked things back up.

“We hear about how we tend to falter during the summer, but we really didn’t this time, and it’s neat to go in to the chase on the top of the points, which is a good psychological edge,” Knaus said.

“This place has been tough on me, so to sweep here this year is an achievement,” Johnson said. “I think having the car-of-tomorrow here this year helped me get a better feel for Richmond.

“I don’t think you have to dominate these next 10 races. I just want to start knocking out those top-fives.”

“I really think you’ll have to be very aggressive in this year’s chase,” Knaus said. “And Jeff Gordon is really strong this season.

“I don’t think you’ll have the same average finish in these 10 that you’ve typically had — a seventh or eighth. I think you’ll need to average a fifth or sixth.”

Gordon has been the year’s dominant driver by far. Under the old traditional point system he would have a whopping 312-point lead right now over Stewart, and 410 over Johnson…and 694 over 12th-place Kevin Harvick.

However under the newest version of the chase, Johnson will go to Loudon, N.H., this week with a 20-point lead against Gordon, 30 points against Stewart, 40 points against Carl Edwards and Kurt Busch, 50 points against Denny Hamlin, Martin Truex Jr., Matt Kenseth, Kyle Busch, Jeff Burton and Kevin Harvick, and 60 points against Clint Bowyer.

Since the difference in any one race between finishing first and finishing ninth is 52 points, the 12 are essentially tied.

Gordon, who has been atop the standings virtually the entire season, appeared the man to beat Saturday night. “We had the car to beat the first half … but if you’re not the car to beat at the end it doesn’t matter,” Gordon said with a smile and a shrug.

“I’ve been watching how Jeff has carried himself these last few weeks,” Johnson said. “I think the racer inside of me feels bad that he’s had this big points lead and yet won’t have that for the chase. But we all knew that’s the way the chase would be.”

The actual dynamics of the 10-race chase, the ebb-and-flow, has been tough to measure during the three seasons it’s been used.

Even a comfortable points lead late in the chase — as Kurt Busch saw in the 2004 run — can turn on a dime. Even in the season finale that season, just as Busch appeared ready to cruise to the crown, he had a tire come off at a most inopportune time, and he narrowly missed hitting the pit wall by only the narrowest of margins.

Hamlin had a rough Saturday, finishing seventh in front of his hometown crowd. But he’s been tough all year, and the title battle could well be Rick Hendrick men Gordon and Johnson vs. Joe Gibbs men
Stewart and Hamlin, with Kyle Busch — the Hendrick man heading next season to Gibbs’ Toyotas — the wild card. “This was one to forget,” Kyle Busch, a miserable 20th, said. “We have to turn something around.”

“We need to pick up our momentum,” Hamlin, sixth in the race, said. “We’re not coming in big, like Jeff and Jimmie. But we’re solid.”

Richard Childress has all three of his teams in the chase, with Burton, Harvick and Bowyer. But the three have clearly lost momentum the past several weeks. “We haven’t had a whole lot go right the last month, and here we were on the verge of having a lot of things go wrong as well,” Harvick said. “We’re capable of winning races, and we know that; we’ve just got to get it together”.

Truex won at Dover but has been nearly invisible the rest of the time, though his consistency has been impressive.

Edwards has been hot but Saturday his engine blew early, an ominous note. Teammate Kenseth hasn’t been very impressive all year, except sporadically. Still Kenseth and crew chief Robbie Reiser have a benchmark operation that rarely makes mistakes.

Kurt Busch may be the one to keep a close eye on, because car owner Roger Penske finally turned a corner this summer and may have the strongest engines at most tracks. Since adding Pat Tryson as crew chief in June, Busch has caught fire.

“But Jimmie Johnson is just on a tear right now, and he’ll be tough to catch,” Kurt Busch said.

“I’m looking at Talladega as the troublemaker, with the car-of-tomorrow (to be tested there Monday and Tuesday). And Charlotte has been a problem for me.

“Johnson is unbelievable right now. You can see the Hendrick cars have an edge on the field at these car-of-tomorrow races. But Joe Gibbs’ guys are right there, too.”

And this was the first of three straight car-of-tomorrow events.

“But we’re poised to be a threat in this deal,” Kurt Busch says. “We have fast cars, we have consistency, and we have patience. The best thing is we have that experience — Pat has been in the chase as a crew chief every year.”

Kenseth isn’t sure how his team might do in the chase: “I feel it could go either way. I’ve got a great team. But we’re obviously not performing up to the level of Jeff and Jimmie. It would take nothing short of a miracle to beat them on performance.

“But I certainly think I have a championship-caliber team that doesn’t make mistakes and does a good job preparing the cars.”

There were plenty of mistakes here Saturday night, 12 cautions and two red flags, for nearly 30 minutes. Gordon led 191 laps, Johnson 104, including the final 61 around this three-quarter-mile track.

“It’s still a week-to-week sport,” Stewart said. “But even with technology changing as fast as it is, if you’ve been pretty good the last four or five weeks, you’ve probably got the best shot at winning the championship.”

“Nobody is picking us to win … which is fine,” Burton said. “But it’s game-on now, and we’ll be trying to make something happen.”

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