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.

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.