The five tracks that will decide the Sprint Cup title

This time of year in this kind of season, every race indeed counts. Heading into Saturday night's event at Chicagoland Speedway, the series leader in race wins has only three victories, meaning that the point gaps between the drivers who ultimately qualify for NASCAR's year-end Chase could be relatively small. And then there's the battle just to get in, and competitors clustered around that cutoff line like hopeful nightclub patrons crowded behind the velvet rope. With drivers swapping positions almost on a weekly basis, every event looms large.

And yet, some of those events loom larger than others. No question, every race pays the same in terms of points, every race has the potential to shuffle the order around that 12th and final position, every race provides another opportunity for the series leader to put a little more distance between himself and the rest of the field. But so much about what happens this time of year is about managing failure, of minimizing the effects of breakdowns or accidents that can have ramifications well beyond a single Sunday afternoon. With eight races left until the Chase begins and 18 remaining in the season, we will soon get to that point where a good day is defined not necessarily by winning, but by not snapping a heim joint, or not leaving lug nuts loose on a pit stop, or not getting turned sideways in traffic.

Certainly, the potential for some kind of season-wrecking misfortune exists with every lap. But on some tracks, five in particular, that potential looms larger. And those are the five tracks that will ultimately determine this season's Sprint Cup champion.

1. Watkins Glen International, Aug. 9
Fine, go ahead. Disrespect the road course. Mock it, even. But don't overlook it, because if you do, mean old Watkins Glen will smack you upside the head. Don't let the beautiful Finger Lakes scenery fool you -- Watkins Glen is a fast, often narrow and often perilous place. This isn't Infineon Raceway, a very different breed of road course with wide runoff areas and rolling esses. Watkins Glen is a high-speed course with tight straightaways and blue guardrails that always seem a little too close. It's also custom-made for bottlenecks, as we saw last summer when David Gilliland and Michael McDowell crashed and took out nearly half the field along with them.

It's a place where even veteran road-course aces have overrun corners and wound up in the gravel traps, where desperate drivers will try banzai runs down that landing strip of a main straightaway, where the issue of fuel mileage is always in the back of everyone's mind. And yet, it's also a place where many of the top Chase contenders -- points leader Tony Stewart, four-time champion Jeff Gordon and defending race winner Kyle Busch among them -- have enjoyed success. Watkins Glen could launch a driver into the Chase. Or it could knock a driver out of it.

2. Richmond International Raceway, Sept. 12
In order to win the Chase, first you have to get into it, and for many drivers that means weathering the pressure and anxiety that so often accompanies that final regular-season event at Richmond. That certainly seems like it will be the case again this year, given that seven drivers -- from ninth-place Greg Biffle through 15th-place Jeff Burton -- are currently within the maximum window of points that one driver can make up on another in any single race. Granted, no driver who's sneaked into the Chase on that final day has ever mounted a serious run at the title. But this year, given how victories and their accompanying bonus points have been spread out, the points gaps promise to be lower. And guys like Matt Kenseth and Mark Martin show every indication of being able to win from the back.

But it's not just the points picture that makes Richmond stand out. While short-track races are always lively and unpredictable in nature, Richmond in recent seasons has taken on almost a wild quality. It's become a place where leaders spin each other out, where on-track vendettas are enacted, where things literally go bump in the night. No question, the guys locked into the Chase will be going all-out for victory, and the guys on the bubble will race cautiously and try to stay out of the way. But that's easier said than done at Richmond, which for the time being seems to have supplanted its sister short track Bristol as the capital of physical, front-fender racing, and where it's always possible to get caught up in somebody else's mess. (Continued)