After Vegas test, Kahne sees a return to past glory

LAS VEGAS -- Kasey Kahne can only hope the inexorable progress he showed during this week's second round of Sprint Cup Preseason Thunder testing is truly a predictor that he and his Gillett Evernham Motorsports team will return to the league-leading level of performance they displayed two seasons ago.

After finishing eighth in the championship in 2006, with six wins, six poles and 19 top-10 finishes Kahne struggled to get a top 10 last season; ending with only eight, including one top-five.

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How ironic that Kahne's latest step in his "comeback" occurred at the same track, Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where he says his 2007 season took a dagger to the heart.

"Last year our test went pretty good until I blew a right front tire and crashed my car that I had won all the races with," Kahne said during Tuesday's lunch break. "That was kind of the year at that point."

A year ago, Cup teams came to Vegas to test for the first time after the 1.5-mile speedway had been reconfigured and repaved. Kahne had the fastest speed that Monday afternoon using the Dodge chassis with which he had won a league-high six races the previous season; but crashed it in the closing moments of practice.

Looking back, it seems that event put him and his team into a spiral from which they never recovered. This year; it took him until the last afternoon to get into the top five on the speed chart, but he ended the test very satisfied.

"I feel like we made some pretty good gains so far," Kahne said. "I'm looking forward to [the Car of Tomorrow]. The car -- the more you drive it, the more you work with it -- the better you make it feel [and] the more you like it.

"I'm starting to like this car as far as the way it handles, and it's getting closer to the car we used to have at this place. We just have to keep working, keep fine tuning, and hopefully it will make things good."

With the Car of Tomorrow being the full-time ride for the Sprint Cup this season, Kahne is trading off an increasing affinity for the vehicle, which he said began with a few relatively strong late-season runs.

His four-session test on Monday and Tuesday reinforced it, as Kahne advanced from 33rd on the Monday morning speed chart, at 175.901 mph (30.699 seconds); to fourth on Tuesday afternoon, at 185.217 (29.155) -- an increase of 1.544 seconds.

"The thing that's been tough is we had a car that handled really well and did things a certain way," Kahne said. "We went to the Car of Tomorrow and it was like taking a step back. So on these tracks, it's the same way. It handles so much different, especially when you're off. The more you work with it, the better you get it to do the things that it needs to do to go around the track right [and] the more fun it gets to drive. (Continued)