Kahne looking to make history this week at Lowe's (cont'd)

Johnson, the current leader in points, certainly is no stranger to Victory Lane at LMS. But he said that Kahne is now the one to beat at this venue, citing not only Kahne's sweep of the two races last May but also Kahne's back-to-back victories at the track in the two 2006 points races.

"Kasey Kahne has had more momentum here than anyone, I would say, over the last two or three years," Johnson said.

Yet Kahne insists that any momentum he may have built last May has disappeared. He arrived at a two-day test at the Charlotte track a couple weeks ago and unloaded the same car with which he captured those two races -- only to quickly discover that setup wasn't going to put him in position to get to Victory Lane again.

In other words, what worked in May for him isn't going to work for him now.

"It's definitely a much different setup than what it was," Kahne said. "I don't know why things change so much. I think the cars, the teams, the engineering ... everything just seems to slowly get better with these cars. From where we were in May to where we are now is a big difference. The cars drive better now. They're doing different things with the shocks and the bump-stops to get them to drive better. You have to stay up with it or you get behind and you won't be fast.

"With this car, people are still learning it and what makes it better. Even with the old car, right up to when we quit using it, people were making improvements every year or every month or every couple of months to make it go faster. It's the same thing with this car.

"If you don't race it for three or four months or don't make any improvements, you're going to get behind. That's just all there is to it. And when we unloaded for the test, where we were for the first race, it just wasn't good enough. We started putting some things into it that we had learned over the last three or four months, and by the end of the test I think we were pretty strong."

That has him excited about his chances of pulling off the unprecedented three-peat. But what he's really pointing toward now is 2009 after what happened in May at Lowe's did not turn out to be the springboard he had hoped for the remainder of the 2008 season.

"I would have thought it would have been, and for a while it seemed like it would be," said Kahne, who missed out on being one of the 12 drivers to qualify for the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship. "I mean, we ran in the top 10 in points [in nine out of 10 weeks after the win at Pocono]. We were strong. We weren't a top-five team, but we were definitely a top-12 team, I thought, going into the Chase. But then we haven't done much since.

"I would have thought [May] would have been a huge boost and we would have made it, because of the team and because we're a strong company that keeps getting stronger. But it didn't work out that way, and we just need to keep working hard to get better."