Weekend That Was: RIR

RICHMOND, Va. -- The Chase for the Nextel Cup has arrived, and soon it will be the best against the best to determine a season's champion.

So coming in, all Chase participants should be brimming with confidence, right? Despite finishing next-to-last in Saturday night's Chevy Rock & Roll 400 because of a blown engine at Richmond International Raceway, Carl Edwards professed to have it. So did Clint Bowyer, who enters the Chase seeded 12th and having yet to win a single Cup race in his career.

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But Matt Kenseth?

Um, not so much.

Kenseth has been Mr. Consistency all season, and indeed for the duration of his mostly quiet but nonetheless remarkable career. With 16 top-10 finishes and eight top-fives to go with his one win this season, Kenseth entered the Richmond race with an average finish over the first 25 races of 12.0 -- second only to the average finish of 8.4 registered by points leader Jeff Gordon.

Yet he didn't sound too hopeful of catching Gordon and those he called the other Chase favorites after battling problems in the pits to finish 14th at Richmond.

"I feel good about our team and about what we've been able to do," Kenseth said. "I don't think our cars are quite quick enough to run with the best guys, but we're getting closer."

With only the 10 Chase races remaining in the 2007 season, it seems a little late to be playing catchup in the horsepower game. And Kenseth admitted it.

"Not to be pessimistic, but I don't think we can beat those guys just on performance," said Kenseth, who drives the No. 17 Ford of Roush Fenway Racing. "I think we can hang in there and we can run top-10 and we can run some top-fives with our normal cars, and who knows what happens at Talladega [in one of the five Car of Tomorrow Chase races]? But certainly if they run at the pace they're running and have no trouble, I don't think we can beat 'em.

"It's hard for anybody to make it through 10 races with no trouble, though, so if they run into some and we pick up our performance a little bit, we might have a shot."

Asked to identify "those guys," Kenseth named four cars as the ones he figures everyone else will be chasing in the Chase.

"The 24, 48, 20 and 11," he said of the Chevrolets driven, respectively, by Gordon, Richmond race winner Jimmie Johnson, Tony Stewart and Denny Hamlin. "I think those four cars seem to have a little bit of an edge on everybody. That's what it seems like to me, anyway."

Johnson enters the Chase as the top seed, by virtue of his series-high six victories this season. Gordon, who held the points lead from the fifth race of the season through the 26th, drops to the second seed because he won "only" four races. Each driver who made the Chase begins with a base of 5,000 points, and is awarded 10 bonus points for each win over the first 26. (Continued)