The garage area at New Hampshire Motor Speedway had turned into command central for damage control. Everywhere you looked there were cars with quarterpanels that were mashed in, or wheel wells that had been hammered roughly back into shape, or dark circles from an opponent's tire emblazoned into the side. These vehicles didn't belong to back-markers, but many of NASCAR's top championship contenders. The first round of the Chase had turned into an ugly street fight, and the scars were evident in the sea of scratched-up sheet metal.

The day left other marks, too, though not as easily visible. Those were found in places like the voice of Kevin Harvick as he chastised his crew for a series of early mistakes; the radio silence of Denny Hamlin as he worked to salvage something out of a day that seemed on the brink of turning disastrous; the crestfallen gaze of Tony Stewart after his gamble to win on gasoline fumes had failed; or the concerned stare of crew chief Chad Knaus, after Jimmie Johnson had recorded the third-worst Chase finish of his championship reign. Nine of the 12 Chase drivers experienced some degree of adversity in Loudon, and Monday morning in shops around central North Carolina, the reclamation projects began. Not all of them were physical.

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Racing is a lot about restraint. In my case, you start out with not very much and slowly learn how to focus. I still don't have it perfect, but that's something I've worked on all this season.

”

-- CARL EDWARDS

Cars aren't the only thing to take a beating during NASCAR's playoff -- psyches do, too. Even when the championship is only a glimmer in the far distance, top competitors on the Cup Series tour work in a hectic, stressful, time-sensitive and performance-based arena that can strain personal relationships, test composure, and uncover deep fissures in confidence. Drop them in a scenario where the point gaps are tightened and the title is decided over a mere 10 weeks, and everything accelerates like a race car on a qualifying lap. How they handle the mental stresses of that environment can be just as critical in determining the champion as part reliability, fuel mileage, aerodynamics or horsepower.

"I think mental toughness is always important," said Chase participant Jeff Burton. "It's easy when things are going well, you know what I mean? When things are going well, it's easy to be mentally tough. The question is, when the chips are down, who is going to be mentally tough? The chips are going to be down for everybody at some point in this Chase, and those will be the defining moments in this Chase. And who can come through those, that's going to determine who the winner is."

It's referred to as "the mental game," and it can be a very real part of an athlete's success or failure. Competitors in sports like golf and baseball regularly use sports psychologists to help them stay positive or remain focused, a practice that's slowly gaining traction among top drivers in NASCAR. Although drivers are part of a larger team, they're in that cockpit by themselves, with plenty of time to think. They can get rattled by unfortunate situations. They can let negative chatter invade their heads. They can obsess over mistakes made laps earlier. They're exceptionally trained, exceptionally skilled, and exceptionally confident, but can be challenged by adversity just like anyone else.

That's where mental toughness comes in, an element as essential as tires or fuel, and capable of separating one driver from another. How much of driving a race car is mental? "From the driver's perspective, I would say that it's at least 50 percent," said sports psychologist Dr. Patrick Cohn, who has worked with several drivers. "Once you're strapped in the car and ready to go, all the training is complete, and now the goal is to get the most out of the car and the most out of your ability on that day. It's got to be 50 percent or greater toward a racer's success."

Which means the Chase, for all the focus on vehicles and equipment, can ultimately be decided between a driver's ears.

Racing with restraint

At its essence, driving a race car is a physical exercise ? you slide through the window opening, step on the accelerator, and turn the wheel. You rely on fine muscles, hand-eye coordination, and well-honed reflexes to pilot the vehicle around the track. And yet, one of the elements that can separate great drivers from merely good ones is an ability to harness the mental challenges inherent to the profession, from communicating information to a crew chief to handling adversity to dealing with the pressures and expectations that go along with competing at NASCAR's highest level.

For a driver with hopes of winning races and championships, those obstacles loom every bit as large as a blown engine or a dropped lug nut on a pit stop. No wonder Chase driver Carl Edwards is a firm believer that racing, for all its physical demands and hazards, is largely a mental game.

"In a normal racing situation, the car is doing the work. It's the inputs that you put into it that make it do a certain thing," Edwards said. "It's your ability to analyze what you feel and be able to communicate what you need while doing those inputs. I don't know about everybody else, but that takes a lot of effort on my part, and it's not physical effort. The physical part makes you more or less comfortable as the race goes on, and I think it makes the mental part easier."

Edwards would know. Perhaps the most physically fit driver in the Cup garage area, he works with Colorado-based Carmichael Training Systems, the same outfit that helped Lance Armstrong win the Tour de France seven times. He said his trainer, Dean Golich, coaches him on the mental as well as the physical aspects of racing. Training, confidence, and natural ability can get a driver to a certain point -- but then it's up to things like composure, patience, and focus to take him the rest of the way.

"You can start a race with a high level of confidence, and things happen that instantly bring up that negative inner chatter and those things you have to deal with," said Cohn, the founder of Peak Performance Sports in Orlando. "Even at the highest levels, they're not perfect with their thinking. When you're in the zone and everything's going great, and your car is performing well and your team is performing well, it's easy. All racers love that feeling. But how often does that happen? Things happen out there, and you have to be able to mentally cope with those things, and not be five laps behind in your thinking."

Indeed, successful NASCAR racing is often successful crisis management, and the best drivers have an ability to get beyond the mechanical problems or human mistakes that would otherwise ruin a competitor's day. Cohn stresses the value of composure, of moving past trouble spots rather than chewing out crew members over the radio, and of projecting an air of confidence and control that boosts rather than demoralizes the rest of the team.

Of course, that's easier said than done. Drivers operate in a high-speed, high-stress environment where it can be difficult to slow down, even mentally. They often come from short tracks and developmental circuits where the mantra is push, push, push. Racers have been late to the game in terms of accepting sports psychology, perhaps because of antiquated and unfounded stigmas. Mastering the mental game can seem almost counterintuitive, but the best drivers learn it through experience and trial and error.

"Racing is a lot about restraint," Edwards said. "In my case, you start out with not very much and slowly learn how to focus. I still don't have it perfect, but that's something I've worked on all this season. We were terrible at the beginning of the season. To not fall off the rails is tough, and I think the Chase is a microcosm of that."

Edwards' work on the mental game has proven integral this season, in which the No. 99 team started sluggishly and yet evolved into a legitimate championship contender by the end of the regular season. The hardest part, he said, is to resist the urge to point fingers and assign blame. Edwards, crew chief Bob Osborne and the members of their Roush Fenway team all stayed on the same page, kept positive, and things turned around. Even four-time defending Cup champion Johnson has noticed.

"I think we're all human, and at some point, people may have a larger window for patience in certain situations," Johnson said. "But the best medicine is running well. If you have a bad race and you come out and run well, it's easy to be like, 'Oh, we're focused, and we've weathered the storm.' But the guys I'm really impressed with are Carl Edwards and Bob Osborne. The crap they've been through the last however long, I know it hasn't been fun for them. But they've both had their heads up, they've both been professional, and now they've gotten it right. Those guys, to me win the patience of the decade award."

And yet, Johnson is the one with a quartet of shiny silver trophies on his mantel. He's earned them because of his natural ability, and his top-level race team, and his unparalleled working relationship with his crew chief. But there's also something else that makes Johnson so good, something that none of his competitors can see. It's the fact that when it comes to the Chase, no one has proven more mentally tough than the driver of the No. 48 car. And it's not his titles, but his lowest moments in the playoff, that bear that out.

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Jimmie Johnson turned laps with a severely damaged car at Loudon in the 2006 Chase opener, but rebounded to win the title.

Step by step

It's easy to forget now, given his dominance of the past four years, but Johnson's unprecedented run of championships was nearly over before it started. The first Chase race of that span, at New Hampshire in September of 2006, was a disaster -- fewer than 50 laps in, the engine in his Chevrolet lost a cylinder, and the resulting poor track position had him in the wrong place at the wrong time when Sterling Marlin and Greg Biffle got into one another. The combined accident damage and engine problem resulted in a 39th-place finish, and dropped the Hendrick driver to ninth in points, 139 off the lead.

In the immediate aftermath, there was despair. Johnson hadn't yet become a champion, hadn't yet gained the confidence and perspective that titles provide. In fact, the timing couldn't have been worse -- following the previous year's unsuccessful championship campaign, tensions between Johnson and Knaus had reached the point where owner Rick Hendrick sat them both down and placed milk and cookies in front of them -- a message that said stop acting like children. And now here they were again, staring up from the abyss.

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The mental toughness really comes into play. After four years now, and really after seven years of being in the Chase, I've just found that I've gotten better and better at it.

”

-- JIMMIE JOHNSON

"There was some serious emotional baggage lingering around after we left here, because we'd been close a few times, and didn't close," Johnson remembered last weekend at Loudon. "And it was like, here we are again, we've had a great season, and now we're out of the running in the first race. So yeah, at that point in time, there was a lot of distress."

So much so, he thought they were out of it. "Oh, without a doubt," Johnson said. "... It's out of your control. Now you're counting on 11 other teams [nine at the time] each having a 30th-place finish. That's just tough to do."

And yet, even though it would get much worse before it would get better -- after being inadvertently spun out by former teammate Brian Vickers at Talladega, he was 156 points behind with just six events remaining -- he and Knaus slowly climbed back into it. They set moderate goals: aim for top-10 finishes, keep alive their streak of final points finishes inside the top five. Be ready in the unlikely event that the Chase drivers ahead of them began to have trouble, which is exactly what happened. Beginning at Charlotte, Johnson unleashed a devastating finishing kick of five straight top-two finishes, and claimed his first title by 56 points.

No question, timing and natural ability played a part. But something else was a factor, too.

"Look at Jimmie Johnson," Edwards said last weekend at New Hampshire. "He came out of this race a few years ago, and to be mentally tough enough to march for the next nine races and not flail and do something stupid, that takes a lot of mental toughness. I think in that case, that's probably what won that championship for him."

Cohn isn't surprised. The most dominant athletes in the world, he said, those like Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Annika Sorenstam, thrive under pressure. The more there is on the line, the better they typically perform. The bigger the stage, the more attuned their confidence and focus become. Johnson, he said, fits right in among that group.

"There are certain guys out there, like Jimmie Johnson, that when they get to the playoffs here or they get down to the Chase, they raise the level of their games. They're called gamers. That's what you really want," Cohn said. "They get excited and they get juiced and they focus even better in the car, as opposed to younger guys or rookies who aren't going to handle it that way. They'll be on the other end. They're not going to be as resilient or as focused. They're not gamers. Pressure is all in the eye of the beholder, but you want a guy who, when the pressure is on, can raise his level of performance and be consistently better. Those are the guys who are going to be successful in the Chase."

It helps to have a crew chief like Knaus, who for all his perceived gruffness is exceedingly calm in crisis situations and is quick to offer encouragement over the radio. "I've got a feeling we're going to have lots of fun," he told his team during the pace laps Sunday at New Hampshire, even though Johnson had tied a season low in qualifying position. Johnson, who started his racing career in off-road trucks that didn't require much in terms of adjustments, leaves the mechanical tinkering to his crew chief. In fact, the more he's in the Chase, the more his focus centers solely on the bigger picture.

"The mental toughness really comes into play," he said. "After four years now, and really after seven years of being in the Chase, I've just found that I've gotten better and better at it. Experience has helped me worry about the right things. Year one, I worried about everything. Year two, I worried about a little less. And then really, after the first championship I won, I was like, OK, now I kind of have a road map to what's really important. Since then, each year in winning the championship, I've kind of fine-tuned that more and more. It's a stressful time, and you're worried about crashing your car, you're worried about every single adjustment. It really does play a lot of games on your mind."

Never more than in 2006, when the No. 48 team thought they were out of it after the first week, yet clawed their way back into contention through a step-by-step approach. That experience will surely serve them well in aftermath of Sunday's event, which turned out to be anything but fun. Johnson was involved in two accidents, suffered a loose wheel, and finished a lap down in 25th place. In the six previous editions of the Chase, only one driver has finished lower than sixth in the opening race and still gone on to win the championship.

Jimmie Johnson. Two days before the event, he spoke of how his past successes might help him deal with potential adversity in the Chase. At seventh in points and 92 points off the lead, that adversity isn't potential anymore.

"In today's world, most probably we'll be extremely disappointed if something happens, but we don't have that pressure of winning our first on our shoulders," Johnson said Friday. "I don't want to make it sound like we're not concerned or we're not trying or it's not important, but you can't help but recognize there's a change in emotion. When you've won a race and you're going for your second, it's different. Let's not sweat the small stuff, do what we can, and it is what it is."

Autostock

Mike Ford knows the importance of mental toughness and his driver, Denny Hamlin, showed plenty at Loudon.

'You have to be numb'

On a much smaller scale, the same patient, step-by-step approach that helped Johnson win the 2006 championship helped Hamlin to retain the points lead Sunday at New Hampshire. When he lost a lap after being spun inadvertently by Edwards, he uttered one gripe over the radio -- "The 99 can't hold his line, can he?" -- followed by steely silence as he worked to regain track position. Up on the bit pox, crew chief Mike Ford wasn't calculating points in his head or thinking about how much ground the No. 11 team might lose in the standings. He stayed focused on the matter at hand.

"You have to deal with what you have in front of you," Ford said, whose car eventually finished second. "You can really screw up if you don't put that emotion behind and think, 'Let's get the most out of the day.' You have to be very numb. You have to leave the emotion out and really study it and try to make the most of what you have. You're not going to change what's happened."

“

Because you lay there and think, make sure you've covered all your bases and heading are in the direction you want to go in against these guys. ... It's exciting, there's that aspect of it, but it's also very mentally tough to lay in bed and think about it.

”

-- STEVE ADDINGTON

In the Chase, it's not only drivers who have to be mentally tough. Crew chiefs and crewmen -- the latter of whom often hold weekday jobs in the shop as well as on the road, and make a fraction of a driver's salary -- face pressure-packed mental challenges, too. In fact, when Kasey Kahne blew his engine in the opening race of last year's Chase, a failure that essentially knocked him out of the playoff, he wasn't worried about his own confidence. He was concerned about the confidence of the men who prepared and serviced his race cars.

"Ten races is a long time," Kahne said. "That's a good thing about it is, 10 races is a while. If you can keep that on your mind, you'll be all right. There's a lot of people to convince. It's not just the driver, [it's] the crew chief, the tire changer. It's a big group. If one guy gets off a little bit, it hurts. It can be any one of us. I think that could be what happened is, maybe one or two guys get off a little, and then it just drags you down, and that's it."

Steve Addington, crew chief for Chase competitor Kurt Busch, can relate. The last time he was in NASCAR's playoff, in 2008, he was on the box for Kurt's younger brother Kyle, and he had as bad a day as Kahne suffered through last season. A suspension bolt that should have been bolted tight somehow came loose, and the resulting failure left the No. 18 team with a 34th-place finish and buried in the point standings.

Addington, easily among the most easy-going personalities in the Cup garage area, urged his guys to try to let go and move on, and realize that nine events still remained. But after the high of winning eight races and dominating the regular season, it was easier said than done.

"It just takes the wind out of your sails, and you have to stay focused," he recalled at New Hampshire. "I kept trying to get the guys to understand that anything can happen. The guys in front of us can have problems, and we can be right back into this thing. But it's so hard to do, because everybody's so tense and so pumped up at this thing to make a good run at it, that it's hard to keep all the guys in the shop and all the guys on the road focused on, 'Hey, we can get back in this thing.' The driver has to say the right things to keep everybody focused and not let everybody think he thinks you're out of it."

Looking back, Busch struggled to convince even himself. "Mentally, it's pretty hard to tell yourself that you've still got a chance after that happens," he said. "... It's pretty devastating and disappointing when you come out of the first race so far at the bottom looking up saying, 'Man, how am I going to get back up there without those guys having trouble?' It's hard to do."

In 2008, Busch and Addington never really had a chance to recover -- the broken suspension piece was followed by engine failure and a last-place finish at Dover, then by a fuel pickup problem at Kansas, and it all combined to send the season's victory leader to an eventual 10th-place result in final points. Now Addington is back in the Chase with a different Busch brother, and had a different host of problems to worry about in New Hampshire. Kurt was involved in a pair of accidents, although the high rate of attrition among Chase drivers helped him salvage a respectable 13th-place finish. Afterward, Busch admitted he over-drove the car.

Focus. Composure. Perspective. Behind the steering wheel, on top of the pit box, or at the end of a jack handle, they all mean the same thing. And this time of year, success in the Chase means mastering the mental game within.

"It's stressful for me, laying in the bed at night and not getting any sleep," Addington said with a wry smile. "Because you lay there and think, make sure you've covered all your bases and heading are in the direction you want to go in against these guys. ... It's exciting, there's that aspect of it, but it's also very mentally tough to lay in bed and think about it."