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.

That's how Kenseth, who had been in the top five in points since winning for the only time when he captured the second event of the season at California, ended up seeded eighth. He has fewer wins than Johnson, Gordon, Stewart (three), Edwards and Kurt Busch (two each), and fewer top finishes than Denny Hamlin and Martin Truex Jr., who also have one win each and are seeded right in front of him in sixth and seventh, respectively (more on all this nonsense later).

Despite being seeded lower, it really doesn't matter. Kenseth essentially is tied with Hamlin and Truex going into the Chase. Each has 5,010 points -- or 50 fewer than the leader in Johnson.

Kenseth admitted that Johnson comes in with the most momentum and that by capturing the last two regular-season races has positioned himself well atop the standings. But he also correctly pointed out that the 50-point edge currently enjoyed by Johnson is miniscule at best.

"Every little bit helps," he said "But it's only 50 points. That's what it used to be from first to 10th going into the Chase, anyway. Fifty points in 10 races is not something you can't overcome, but certainly when you give the guys on the biggest roll right now and probably the best team a 50-point headstart, that's tough to gain on unless they have problems."

No dark horse

Strangely, Kenseth forgot to mention Edwards, his Roush Fenway Racing teammate, when handicapping the Chase. Edwards is seeded fourth and despite the tough finish at Richmond truly appears to be brimming with the confidence required to pull off a championship.

Gordon certainly has noticed it, and corrected a reporter who asked if he thought Edwards was a dark-horse candidate to chase down the title.

"I don't consider him a dark horse at all," Gordon said. "I consider him one of the favorites."

New math

Much of the post-Richmond talk centered on how Gordon, who has been the points leader virtually all season, now must begin the Chase as the second seed -- 20 points behind Johnson because he has two fewer wins.

This already has been kicked around by many minds great and small, but shouldn't the points leader get something for finishing the regular season atop the standings? Furthermore, if NASCAR really wants to keep seeding these guys according to who did the best over the first 26 races, it's ridiculous that Truex, who had far fewer top-five and top-10 finishes than Kenseth overall, jumps ahead in the seeding just because he had one more third-place finish (they both finished second twice, but Truex also finished third twice to only once for Kenseth -- which constitutes the current tiebreaker NASCAR uses).

Why not try this? Keep the 10-point bonuses in place for victories, but at the end of 26 races re-set the points by starting the Chasers with a base of 5,000 as now and giving the leader an additional 60 points, whomever is second in points 55, third 50, and so on through to 12th, who would get only five.

If that format would have been used this year, Gordon would remain the No. 1 seed heading into the Chase with 5,100 points. Johnson would still be rewarded for having the most wins by jumping to the No. 2 seed just five points behind Gordon at 5,095 (60 for the six wins plus 35 for placing sixth in regular-season points).

The rest of the Chase under that format would be as follows: 3. Stewart (5,085); 4. Edwards (5,065); 5. Hamlin (5,060); 6. Kenseth (5,050); 7. Jeff Burton (5,040); 8. Kurt Busch (5,035 but two wins); 9. Kyle Busch (5,035 and one win); 10. Truex (5,020 and one win); 11. Bowyer (5,020 but no wins); 12. Kevin Harvick (5,015 and one win).

Harvick, in 12th, would be 85 points out of first -- still well within striking distance over 10 playoff races but with the points leader and those who performed more consistently over the entire course of the season at least being rewarded a bit more for it. Plus, actually winning the races would remain a top priority.

No sympathy

Kenseth wasn't too sympathetic about Gordon's fall from the first seed to second for the Chase.

"Everybody thinks about it different," he said. "But you've got to create a whole new way of thinking, and start thinking about the new way. Without his 100-point penalty and if there was no Chase format, Jeff certainly would have the championship this year. So far, for 26 races, they've performed like a championship team more than anybody else.

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"But the 48 is right there and they're on their way, and who knows how some of those other teams would have run if it wasn't a Chase format? They might have squandered a few points here and there, taking chances on stuff because they thought it wouldn't matter."

Others out there

Despite the media blitz concerning the Chase (and more specifically the saturation coverage of the guy who finished 13th and out of it altogether), there were other stories largely overlooked at Richmond.

David Ragan and Johnny Sauter finished third and fifth, respectively. It was the rookie Ragan's best career finish and his first top-five since finishing fifth in the season-opening Daytona 500. It was the first top-five for Sauter this season and in his fledging career.

Others well out of the Chase picture who fared well at Richmond: Kasey Kahne continued a late-season surge and finished eighth; lame-duck Joe Gibbs Racing driver J.J. Yeley finished 10th; and David Reutimann of much-maligned Michael Waltrip Racing placed a season-high 13th.

Ragan kind of summed it up for all the overlooked upstarts in the race afterward.

"We just showed everybody that we're capable of running in the top-five or top-10," he said. "We knew that we had some great racecars, but here in Nextel Cup racing it takes a lot more than just a good car. You've got to have good pit stops. You can't have mistakes on restarts. You just have to have a solid night all the way around, and that's what it takes."

Pit stops

• With half of the Chase races running the COT, it's no wonder folks such as Kenseth give the top teams from Hendrick Motorsports and Joe Gibbs Racing the edge. Those two organizations have been a step ahead of the rest in their COT programs all year, and now it looks as if it probably will pay off with a championship for one of their teams.

• Edwards, in his No. 99 Ford, and Busch, in his No. 2 Dodge, appear to be the favorites to spoil the Chevrolet party in the Chase because they won two races each this season and they've both won recently. But don't rule out the steady Kenseth, no matter how much he tries to downplay his chances. The elder Busch, by the way, drives the only Dodge to qualify.

• Remember when everyone (or at least Jack Roush) was worried about Toyota coming into Cup racing and dominating this season? Maybe they should have kept their eyes closer on Chevrolet, which clinched its 31st Manufacturer's Championship since 1952 -- and fifth in a row -- with Johnson's victory at Richmond. This year, Chevys have won 19 of the 26 Cup races and have nine drivers in the 12-man Chase.

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.