Two races into the Cup Series season and Chicken Little is backstage stretching his vocal chords. But the sky is not falling. Matt Kenseth will not maintain his pace. Ditto Dale Earnhardt Jr., who currently sits 35th in points.

Change is inevitable.

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Denny Hamlin and Jimmie Johnson head to Las Vegas Motor Speedway wide-eyed -- not from the bright lights of The Strip, rather in anticipation of continuing their good luck at the 1.5-mile track.

Hamlin and Johnson, a three-time winner at Vegas, have two of the top three best average finishes. Curbing that enthusiasm is points leader Kenseth, who's also in the mix.

Kenseth is vying to become the first driver to win the first three races in a season, and he's doing it with a first-year crew chief. "I just feel great about the group we have assembled," Kenseth said after his victory at Fontana. "Everybody's having fun, everybody's loose and everybody's performing at the same time.

"I think [crew chief] Drew [Blickensderfer] has given the leadership and the start that they kind of need and [engineer] Chip [Bolin] has all the extra time to work on the cars and keep up with the engineering and the data and sift through all that stuff, and they've been able to work great together so far."

Roush has a series-best six wins in 11 races at Las Vegas: Mark Martin in 1998; Jeff Burton in 1999-2000; Kenseth in 2003-04) and defending race winner Carl Edwards. Yet none of that matters to Hamlin or Johnson, both of whom are outside the top 12 and looking to begin making a move toward the top of the point standings.

"I think this is going to be a good measure of our 1.5-mile program," said Johnson, who last year finished a career-worst 29th in his seventh start at LVMS. "I think everyone knows where we need a little bit of work and help and that's on the high-banked 1.5-mile tracks and Vegas is kind of in that middle stage.

"If I look at Chicago last year, we got beat there on the last lap but it was on a restart and I went up and took the lead from the No. 18 [Kyle Busch] so I feel really good about the Vegas, Kansas, Chicago-style tracks. It's just the ones with more banking that we need a little bit more work."

The No. 48 will debut a new chassis this weekend despite not having a test session. "I don't know how much we can all learn without testing," said Johnson, currently 19th in points. "It's going to be a great test to the engineers and the seven-post rigs and all that stuff that we all own and use, but we're always able to go to the track and validate it and see if that stuff has worked or not."

Hamlin, who also will drive in the Nationwide Series race on Saturday, says rolling onto the track cold will be a challenge.

"Vegas is a track where we've spent two days testing in recent years. You can't really make up for not having two days of testing but it really puts the emphasis on the crew to set up a car that is as close as possible off the truck," Hamlin said.

"The less time you can spend making major changes in practice, the more time you can spend fine tuning your cars for the race. That's where you want to be.

"Vegas is a fast track, much more like Charlotte since they made the changes to the track a few years ago," he added. "It's unique in that the transitions are different than other intermediates but you get really close racing. The track changes over the course of the race so the driver can usually find a place where the car works."