An unfamiliar situation for NASCAR's consistency king (cont'd)

"We've run so bad," he said as post-race fireworks shot overhead. "I just want to run good and be back up front where we belong. We have a championship-caliber team as far as personnel. ... We're capable of much better than this. And to be honest with you, more so than the Chase, I'm trying to think how in the world we're going to get this team back to running up front where it should be, leading laps and contending for wins. Because we haven't done that since Fontana."

Fontana, Calif., was the site of the second of Kenseth's back-to-back wins to open the season. Fontana is also a very long time ago. In the grand scheme of things, Kenseth hasn't really been bad -- he's finished 14th or better in seven of his last eight outings -- but he also hasn't really looked championship-caliber, either. Even so, Atlanta was potentially one of those season-saving efforts, a 12th-place result that could have been 30th. Fifteen laps in, the rear end of Kenseth's car wiggled and slammed into the wall. The damage didn't look bad at first. It turned out to be serious enough to require three crewmen working under the car to fix crush panels, and rolls of tape to keep the quarterpanel adhered to the car.

Kenseth lost a lap due to repairs, and got it back thanks to the free pass. But he struggled to make up any ground, and another problem began to raise its head. The front splitter was dragging the ground at times through the corner, a situation that so frustrated the driver that Kenseth proclaimed it "an absolute disaster" on the radio. Fixing it would have required a long pit stop. Since the problem was intermittent, they decided to put up with it. It would bite them in the end.

"The problem with that is, it's a catch-22," crew chief Drew Blickensderfer said. "When you have double-file restarts, usually you don't notice it as bad, because the pace isn't as fast. We noticed it under the green flag stop, that it hit too hard under green. But then toward the end of the race when we were running in top 10, if you take time to adjust your front gaps and get the splitter off the ground, you're going to come out running 20th. You don't want to take time to do that."

Not with a Chase berth hanging in the balance, you don't. At one point, it truly looked bleak -- Kenseth struggled at the tail end of the lead lap, fellow bubble boy Kyle Busch was in the lead, and the driver of the No. 17 had fallen to 14th in points. But as good teams so often do, they found a way out of it. They hit on something during a pit stop, and Kenseth shot up into the top 10. "You're faster than everybody by two tenths [of a second] right now," Blickensderfer told him on the radio. On the final restart with 10 laps remaining, Kenseth was amazingly in seventh.

Then the splitter issue reappeared. According to Blickensderfer, it drags differently depending on how much air is on it. When you're in the back of the field, as Kenseth was much of Sunday night, it's not bad. "Late in the race, you're going hell-bent, it's dark, it's cool, this is for the win, it's going to drag a lot harder," the crew chief said. "You try to judge that, but it's hard to do. And with the amount of things we had going on, we couldn't fix it."

After the final restart, Kenseth went steadily backward, and his frustration was evident on the radio. "I can't drive this fricking thing with a piece of plywood on the ground!" he shouted at one point." All that work and effort for a 12th-place finish left him wanting to rip the steering wheel off its mounting. By the end, the Chase seemed the least of his concerns. For a driver accustomed to contending for wins and championships, just sneaking into the playoffs isn't the ultimate goal.

"Take out the first two weeks, and it's probably the worst we've run since '01. It's starting to get on my nerves," said Kenseth, referring to his second-full time season, when he finished 13th in points and failed to win a race. "... Hopefully, we'll have a good run at Richmond and make it in. If we do, that's great. If we don't run better than we've run here lately, we probably don't deserve to get in. But we'll go there and give it 100 percent effort and hope it turns out OK."

Kenseth has been in this position once before. In 2005, when 10 drivers qualified for the Chase, he went to Richmond ninth in the standings, only 11 points ahead of 11th place. It's the only time prior to this season that he's approached the cutoff event with his playoff status in doubt. That year, it didn't matter -- he finished second at Richmond, and got in easily. This year, he hasn't finished in the top five since Dover on the final day of May. Kenseth walked off into the Atlanta night with his Chase destiny far from secure. For NASCAR's Mr. Consistency, it had to feel like walking into an unknown.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.