With another road win, Chase top seed is Busch's (cont'd)

"The way this deal works, if you go to New Hampshire and blow the engine on the first lap, you can still win the championship. It doesn't matter," said Edwards, who was 21st in Saturday's first practice but rebounded to 12th in the final session. "It's 10 races, and even 100 or 150 points the first race, it doesn't matter. Mathematically, obviously it's better to have as many points as you can. In our minds, it's not over until it's over."

Those bonus points may make more of a difference for a driver like Gordon, who hasn't won this season, and is staring at a deficit of 70 points before he even starts his first Chase race. "That's a lot of points to have to make up," he said. "When you haven't been able to have the dominating wins like we had last year, last year we had the bonus points but we also had the makeup of being able to make up a lot of points if we needed to. One of the things that's happening is, we're gaining on things pretty rapidly over the last month. I feel like that's going to continue into the next month. We desperately need to get some bonus points. Those are starting to become crucial as we get closer."

Busch has two road-course victories already this year, a Sprint Cup event at Sonoma as well as a Nationwide triumph at Mexico City, and according to NASCAR can become the first driver to win three road-course events in a single season. Although he'll start first Sunday because qualifying was rained out and the field set on points, he made only 18 laps total in Saturday's two practice sessions as his team tinkered with the car. Busch ranked 13th in the first session and 15th in the second.

And to the points leader, clinching the top Chase seed is immaterial. "You go out there and run as hard as you can in practice, qualifying and the race, and see what you've got," Busch said. "Whether you win or run out of gas and finish 36th, it doesn't matter at this point. Second through 36th don't really matter, but a win would be nice."

If anything, these latter weeks of NASCAR's regular season have taken some pressure off the top contenders. Although no drivers have clinched Chase spots, Busch's position has been so secure that his team was able to experiment with setups and fuel strategies last weekend at Pocono. Similarly, Edwards has no worries. "I know I'm coming here and all I have to do is win the race," he said. "I don't have to worry about points. You've got no stress. Just go out and have fun. That's a real rarity in Sprint Cup competition, to be able to come to the racetrack and there's no stress."

But the competition will try to put as much pressure on the leader as they can. Gordon offered one such shot across the bow, saying that he thinks the No. 18 team has come back to the field in recent weeks, and that those 70 bonus points comprise the only real advantage Busch has right now.

"They just haven't shown to me what they were showing earlier in the season," Gordon said. "He won a race four races ago. It hasn't been that long since he's won, but for some reason I haven't seen the same type of performance out of them here recently. I would have thought the Brickyard and at Pocono, that they would have really shined there, and they didn't. I think they're showing some weakness right now, so right now the bonus points are huge for them. In order to really go into that Chase with confidence and feel like they are the team to beat they're going to have to get themselves in a position to win a couple more races before that starts."