Welcome to Kansas, where the real Chase begins

The preliminaries are over. Say goodbye to these idiosyncratic mile race tracks with their narrow grooves and charming little nicknames, and hello to a big tri-oval that's neither magical nor monstrous. After two weeks of posturing, of jockeying about for position, of separating true contenders from pretenders, it's time to get down to the real business of NASCAR's playoff, on an intermediate track that's as meat-and-potatoes as the barbecue platters that helped make Kansas City famous.

Curse them if you must, deride them as cookie-cutter if you want, but the fact of the matter is these intermediate tri-ovals are the very heart of the Chase, the fulcrum on which the entire championship battle often turns. Places like New Hampshire and Dover and Martinsville and Talladega are about survival, about keeping it clean on restarts and trying not to become a casualty when somebody else has trouble, about managing misfortune and salvaging whatever you can. The intermediate tri-ovals, though, are all about speed and handling and setup, about rolling off the truck strong and leaving everyone else behind, about watching cars get strung out and discovering just how good each is on their own.

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It may not always be as entertaining, it's typically not as rock-'em sock-'em as door-to-door beat-downs on smaller tracks, but it's absolutely essential to determining the championship. With four intermediate tri-ovals on the playoff schedule -- including three in a row starting Sunday -- it's not a stretch to say that the team that finds the best combination on these tracks has a definitive edge on the competition. So welcome to Kansas, the home of fine college basketball and even better T-bones, and where in some respects the real Chase begins this weekend.

"Really, it's almost like everyone is going to have to start over," points leader Denny Hamlin said after last weekend's race at Dover, and in many ways he's right. Beginning Sunday, the Chase changes, not necessarily in scope but in texture. It becomes less about gouging on restarts and more about aerodynamics and pure speed. The onus shifts from trying to avoid trouble to trying to maximize opportunity. The first two races are all about trying to not lose the championship, while Kansas begins the stretch where teams start trying to win it.

Perhaps that's why no driver who's led the Chase after the first two races has gone on to win the title, a trend Hamlin will certainly try to reverse this year. Kansas, though, is another story altogether. In 2007, eventual champion Jimmie Johnson finished third at Kansas to take the series lead for the first time in the playoff, by six points over Jeff Gordon; although he gave it up again the next week, that day on the bluffs of the Missouri River was a harbinger of things to come. In 2008, Johnson won at Kansas to again seize the series lead for the first time in the Chase, this time by 10 points over Carl Edwards. He never relinquished it from that point on.

In fact, that entire 2007 Chase -- and in some ways, Johnson's entire run of consecutive championships -- was substantially impacted by a rainy day in Kansas, when one of those massive prairie thunderstorms interrupted the event for more than two hours. Lightning forced spectators beneath the grandstands, thunder shook the ground. And there was Tony Stewart, who had gambled on fuel and taken the lead at the delay, betting that the event would not resume. Had it all ended there, Stewart would have been the race winner, taken a healthy points lead, and Johnson's record run of consecutive championships might never have become reality.

Of course, it didn't end there. The thunderstorm passed, NASCAR decided to run as much of the race as it could in the remaining daylight, and a fading Stewart was caught up in an accident that wrecked his title hopes as much as his afternoon. Now, here comes Johnson again, his drive for five in high gear after his victory at Dover, back up to second in points and again poised to take over the series lead with a good run at Kansas. An early-season win at Fontana and a recent third-place finish at Atlanta have crew chief Chad Knaus feeling positive about his No. 48 team's intermediate-track program.

"I feel good about it," he said. "If you go back and look at our performance in Chicago, we qualified respectable. We led a good portion of that race. I think if you go back and you look at how we ran at Charlotte Motor Speedway, we ran very competitive there. We basically took ourselves out of both of those races. I think leading into that, with Kansas being very similar to Chicago, [we're] looking forward to it. I think the performance we had in Atlanta was definitely a direction that you can see where we're headed toward going into Charlotte Motor Speedway, Homestead, and definitely Fontana, we're always excited to go there. We obviously won there in the spring. I think our big track stuff is pretty close. We're excited about it."

Kansas, though, is just the first step. Fontana and Charlotte await the next two weeks, with Texas looming in the distance. Given how intermediate tri-ovals dominate the Sprint Cup schedule, it's only fitting that they play a significant role in the Chase. Hit the setup jackpot at those four venues, and you have an inside track to the title. For all his victories at places like Martinsville and Dover, Johnson's steadfastness on intermediate tri-ovals has been the bedrock of his championship reign. His average finish in 16 starts on those tracks in the past four Chases is a not-so-shabby 7.0. He's won five times, finished as runner-up in four other instances, and recorded only one truly bad finish -- 2009 at Texas, when he and Sam Hornish Jr. wrecked on the third lap.

Of course, that's not the only instance where the Chase seemed to hang in the balance on an intermediate track. There was the first playoff in 2004, when Kurt Busch's blown engine at Atlanta set the stage for the furious finish at Homestead. There was Carl Edwards' desperate banzai run on the final lap at Kansas in 2008, and his epic 69-lap fuel run at Texas a few weeks later that kept him on the edges of the championship picture. And then there's Johnson, whose trio of runner-up finishes at Atlanta, Charlotte and Texas keyed his 2006 comeback, and whose victories in California and Concord last season broke the will of the competition.

So, welcome to Kansas City. Have a steak. Do some riverboat gambling. Take a look at all the fountains. And let the Chase truly begin.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.