WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. -- The Chase for the Sprint Cup championship is still five races away, but series leader Kyle Busch can take his first step toward winning it with a victory Sunday at Watkins Glen International.

A sweep of this season's road-course events would clinch the top seed in NASCAR's 10-race playoff for Busch, who currently holds a 40-point edge over Carl Edwards in the bonus points that decide Chase seeding. Since drivers receive 10 Chase bonus points for each victory and only four regular-season events remain after Watkins Glen, an eighth win on the season would give Busch an insurmountable 50-point edge over Edwards, who has won four times but had his bonus points at Las Vegas Motor Speedway deducted for infractions found on his car.

“

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.

”

CARL EDWARDS

What does that mean? Reigning champion Jimmie Johnson entered last year's Chase with a 20-bonus-point edge over teammate Jeff Gordon, and fell as low as fourth in the standings before rallying to win the title. But he believes those bonus points gave him something of a cushion early in the Chase, and given his eventual 23-point margin of victory over Gordon, they proved crucial late.

"You know, it's important, especially for the first two or three races when everybody is so worried about the points and where you're at. It really buys you some sleep and peace of mind at the start of the Chase," said Johnson, who has two wins on the season, and whose lap of 121.815 mph was fastest in final practice Saturday at Watkins Glen.

"From my own experience, now, it can be different for others, but as the season wears on and those final 10 wear on, you're really just looking at the total and where it's at. For whatever reason, you forget about the seeding process, especially when you leave tracks like Talladega and Martinsville. You have so many other things on your mind that the seeding process is kind of at the bottom of the totem pole. Even though it is an important factor, but you just start worrying about what's ahead and those challenges that you have at the track. But he's definitely going to have a margin going into it. And the way those guys have been and how good they've been, we're all going to have to show up on our game to beat them."

Although Edwards is third in points behind Dale Earnhardt Jr., his four victories on the season would vault him into second if the Chase were to begin today. Busch clinching the Chase's top seed would have no effect on his strategy, which is simply to go for as many wins as possible between now and the playoff opener Sept. 14 in New Hampshire. And he doesn't believe a deficit would hamper him once the Chase begins.

"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."