AVONDALE, Ariz. -- This Sprint Cup championship race has succeeded in turning even the mundane into the controversial. How else to explain why a crowd of reporters gathered in the garage area at Phoenix International Raceway on Saturday to watch perhaps the most insipid activity of an entire NASCAR race weekend -- pit selection.

It was every bit as thrilling as it sounds. Crew chiefs, some of them holding pit-road diagrams with their favored stalls highlighted, gathered around a NASCAR official standing atop the vehicle scale. One by one, in order of their qualifying spot, they walked up to the official and had their selections denoted on a clipboard. Other crew chiefs would crane their necks to see who had chosen what. In the moment of highest drama, Mike Ford and Chad Knaus -- respective crew chiefs for Denny Hamlin and Jimmie Johnson, the top two drivers in the standings -- stood only a few feet from one another. The tension was palpable. Bystanders watched waiting for ... what? Two crew chiefs to go down in a heap of flying fists?

Johnson pulls out of his stall, located next to Hamlin's at Texas.

“

I'm not smart enough to play mind games. I just get in the car, do my thing and I go. The fact that people think so much about what we're trying to do ends up being a mind game in its own.

”

-- JIMMIE JOHNSON

That's what this championship race, which reaches its penultimate stage Sunday in the Sonoran Desert, has wrought. Something as ridiculously bland as pit selection has emerged as a potential flashpoint in the cold war between the top two title contenders, with the third-place driver egging them on. So much of the understated trash talk between the No. 11 and No. 48 teams stems from the fact that Knaus broke some unwritten rule by choosing a stall directly in front of Hamlin at Kansas, leading Ford to return the favor last week at Texas. Which explains who reporters were on hand Saturday to watch an exercise that usually takes place in anonymity.

There's been a lot of talk this week about mind games -- who's playing them, and to what end, and what effect they may ultimately have on the championship picture. Truthfully, it's difficult to believe that drivers who can maintain an iron focus throughout 500 white-knuckle miles at Talladega will suddenly become unnerved because somebody chose a certain pit stall or made a certain sarcastic comment. But in a title race that's so close, and has so many players, with 59 points separating the three drivers still in contention, everything becomes magnified. Everything is interpreted as a challenge. Everything comes across as a mind game, even when it's not.

Case in point: Ford's comments last week that he wasn't going to tiptoe around the No, 48 team, that Knaus' decision to switch pit crews mid-race was a sign of weakness, and that his team was better. The crew chief of the No. 11 car is a refreshingly candid and forthright individual whose team -- lest anyone forget -- is the one on top of the standings, at least for one week. This is a guy who has proven he's not afraid to admonish his own driver, and his is the only team among the three title contenders that will end the Chase with the same pit crew it started with. But he states what he believes at Texas, and suddenly, he's playing a mind game.

Like art, such things are often in the eye of the beholder. And yet, it seemed very clear what Kevin Harvick was trying to do Friday, when he leveled one verbal broadside after another at Ford for poking the bear that is the No. 48 team. Even on his best days, Kevin Harvick can be a difficult interview, issuing terse or even one-word answers during his weekly media availability at the race track. But this week he held forth like motorsports version of Dr. Phil, at times outright mocking a competitor he needs to make mistakes over the final two races to give him a chance to slip in and win this thing.

"I know Kevin well enough to know that he's just telling you what he believes to be true," said Jeff Burton, Harvick's teammate at Richard Childress Racing. "He's not a mind game kind of guy. He's just straight at you -- this is how it is, this is how I feel, and what you are getting from Kevin is what he honestly feels."

But in this case, the interpretation matters more than the intent. The RCR driver has done a masterful job of stoking the rivalry between the top two teams in the standings. "That's what he's known for," Ford said when asked if Harvick was trying to get inside his head. He's not the only one good at it, though. Johnson's team, through both its dominance and its seeming imperviousness to outside influences, can play on an opponent's mental state as well. He's done it before, getting fellow competitors fixated on everything -- inspection tolerances, who gets selected for tire tests, and the like -- but how to beat the No. 48.

The beauty is, he barely looks like he's trying, and still the opposition can get skittish. There's so much emphasis on business as usual, that the No. 48 team makes it appear it can do anything -- even change crews in the middle of a race -- and not miss a beat.

"From a mind game standpoint, we don't intentionally do much of it if any at all," said Johnson, 33 down to Hamlin. "I think we've been very fortunate in the past to have our performance on track speak for us. There just really hasn't been a need, and we really focus on doing our jobs to go out and win races and lead laps and put pressure on the competitors. I'm not smart enough to play mind games. I just get in the car, do my thing and I go. The fact that people think so much about what we're trying to do ends up being a mind game in its own. They are almost Jedi mind-tricking themselves."

Which, of course, is the mind trick in and of itself. Then there's Hamlin, whose game is to stay above it all. The most important race of the season arrives, he's leading the points for the first time this late in the season, he's on the brink of a breakthrough championship, and he's where? In Las Vegas. Playing golf with PGA Tour professional Bubba Watson. Intended or not, it all creates a "what, me worry?" effect that leads you to think Hamlin is coasting toward the finish, distracted by all these other things, when exactly the opposite is true. Johnson's assertion that the No. 48 team is using Ford's comments from last week as billboard material? Big deal, Hamlin says. Everybody does that kind of thing.

"I think every team uses negative publicity as motivation. We do it every year," he said. "When the media sets out their projections of who's going to finish where, and one of y'all leaves us out of the Chase, or one of y'all have us at the bottom, we post it right on the board and we say, we're gonna stick it to you're a--. It's no different. Whatever works. To me, it's whatever works for each individual team for motivation. It's no different with pit crews. Some teams get more motivated when they get [yelled at] or whatever. Some teams, their morale goes down. Each individual team, I think, is different."

Just as each competitor in this championship race is playing the mental game in his own way. Unfortunately, there was no renewal of hostilities in pit-stall selection this week at Phoenix -- Johnson will stop down at one end of pit road Sunday, Hamlin at another. Surely, no one was more disappointed at that news than Harvick. "If I was [Johnson], and I qualify worse than the 11, I would pit right in front of them again just to do it all over," he said earlier. " We all loved watching it. It was great. I hope it all happens the exact opposite way this week."

And the mind games continue.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.

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