The five tracks that will decide the Sprint Cup title (cont'd)

3. Dover International Speedway, Sept. 27
There's no question, getting off to a good start in the Chase is a key to winning it. Busch saw all the groundwork he laid during a stellar regular season disappear thanks to mechanical issues in the first few playoff events, and Greg Biffle hung around until the final weeks on the strength of his victories in the first two Chase races. No question there are those rare instances like Jimmie Johnson's 2006 campaign, where he was buried at the start and rallied to win the title with five consecutive finishes of second or better. But in the Chase as in any single event, it's always better to get away clean and force everyone else to try to catch you.

In that regard, there's often a lot of attention paid to the Chase opener at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. But the flat track in Loudon is a rather technical layout where setup plays a huge role, and one driver can check out and leave everyone else behind. The real obstacle in that opening segment of the Chase comes the next week at Dover, where high speeds and high banks meet short-track proximity, and the potential for a multi-car pileup always looms. "I'm always scared there," Busch once admitted, with good reason. They don't call it "the Monster" for nothing.

Back in 2004, what began as two cars bouncing off one another turned into a 19-vehicle melee at Dover, a speedway with tight straightaways and a "self-cleaning" banking that sends everything tumbling toward the bottom of the track. There was an 18-car pileup there in 1995. Cars are traveling so fast, and the walls are always so close, that collisions can be thunderously hard. So are the impacts of those accidents on a driver's hopes in the Chase.

4. Talladega Superspeedway, Nov. 1
It's sitting there out in the north Alabama hills, that huge and nefarious 2.66-mile oval of high-banked asphalt, just waiting for the series to arrive. It's almost four months until the Sprint Cup Series once again descends on Talladega, but rest assured, drivers bound for the Chase are already thinking about it -- especially in the aftermath of last week's smash-'em-up finish at Daytona International Speedway. They want nothing more than to get in and get out with their points position and their facilities intact.

To say that Talladega lurks as the greatest obstacle for any championship hopeful is a massive understatement, like saying the moon landing was a great scientific achievement or the miniskirt was a great breakthrough in fashion. There is going to be a multi-car crash, almost certainly a Big One, and given how quickly cars shuffle from the front to the rear and back again, someone with title aspirations is bound to get caught up in it. And judging from the finishes of the last two restrictor-plate events -- the wreck between Carl Edwards and Brad Keselowski at Talladega that sent the No. 99 car flying into the fence, and the Stewart-Busch incident last week that sent the No. 18 car spinning into the wall -- we know how this one is going to end.

Somebody is going to try to pass coming off the final corner. Somebody is going to try to block coming to the finish line. Somebody is going to wind up sitting in a crumpled hulk of sheet metal as a result. At Talladega, it's not a matter of when. It's a matter of who.

5. Phoenix International Raceway, Nov. 15
The folks at Homestead-Miami Speedway do a very nice job hosting the final event of the Sprint Cup season, but let's be honest -- there's often very little drama remaining by the time the series reaches metro Miami. In the five years of the Chase era, there's only been one time when fans were really left holding their breath at Homestead, and that was when Kurt Busch overcame a wheel falling off his car to edge Johnson by eight points in the inaugural playoff season of 2004.

Every year since, the point margin between the first- and second-place drivers coming to Miami has grown a little wider -- from 52 in 2006, to 63 in 2006, to 86 in 2007, to 141 last season. While the title has statistically been in doubt each of those times, realistically the finale has been little more than a coronation. Which tells us that a driver's real last chance to take a shot at the leader comes not at Homestead, but in the penultimate event at Phoenix International Raceway.

It's a fitting place, too, given the 1-mile track's quirky layout and rich racing history, factors that lead some to call Phoenix kind of a Darlington of the West. Drivers almost universally love the place, which like Dover is large enough to generate high speeds but small enough that cars often wind up with scratches and black streaks down their sides. And when the sun finally goes down over the Estrella Mountains, it effectively sets on the championship Chase as well.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.