Welcome to NASCAR’s latest rendition of playoffs, the Chaos for the Cup.
At this rate, somebody’s going to stumble to the Nextel Cup championship by averaging double-digit finishes.
Surely the framers of the Chase didn’t envision a time when the leader would stand embarrassed at the top. But that’s how Matt Kenseth seems, with his finishes of 10th, 10th, 23rd, fourth, 14th and 11th thus far in NASCAR’s playoffs.
“We haven’t run good in this Chase,” said the driver everybody else is chasing (except where it matters, on the tracks).
Kenseth is there because “we’ve probably had the least amount of trouble,” he acknowledged, in a field otherwise smitten to a man by lousy luck at some point.
Rookie Denny Hamlin, riding a roller coaster of his own, can do the ironic math: “All you’ve got to run is 12th, average, these first six races to be leading the points. But you’ve got to finish fifth every week [back in regular season] to make the Chase.”
Tony Stewart, the 2005 champion who missed the cut this time, has a higher average finish through the first six Chase races than Kenseth, 11.83 to 12.0.
The consensus of this punditry is that a free-for-all down to the wire is precisely what NASCAR wanted when it initiated the Chase in 2004.
No doubt, there’s plenty to talk about. Only 48 points separate the top five, from Kenseth down to Jeff Burton, who plummeted from the lead with a blown engine last Sunday at Martinsville, Va.
Only 99 points separate the top eight. Ninth-place Jeff Gordon is only 141 behind. That deficit is erasable in a single race, and so Gordon is back in the hunt for a fifth championship.
Even last-place Kyle Busch is only 171 behind, with a 156-point swing possible in any given race.
Hamlin, astounded to find himself just 47 points out of the lead, was like the kid who blurted that the emperor has no clothes: “It’s just amazing to me that nobody’s really stepped up in this Chase.”
Kenseth called it “pretty sloppy so far,” but Hamlin countered that “it’s not sloppy, it’s just that everybody’s had bad luck. Gordon blows engines, Jimmie gets in last-lap wrecks, I get in first-lap wrecks . . . “
Kevin Harvick isn’t so much sheepish as relieved about being second, “considering the last few weeks that we have had,” he said this week. “We’ve had an engine failure at Dover, we had transmission trouble at Charlotte, and we wrecked at least once last week. We wrecked at Kansas, we wrecked at Talladega . . . “
In a way, Harvick figures, Chasers and their teams have been creating their own bad luck, with extreme technological gambling in search of the slightest advantages.
“Everybody is pushing everything to the extreme, whether it’s engines, bodies, drivers,” Harvick said. “No matter what it is, you’re pushing everything as hard as you can, so you’re walking an ultra-thin line of being good with an advantage of more horsepower or more downforce or . . . being more aggressive on the racetrack.
“But when you push it too far, you wind up crashing, or blowing an engine, or [breaking] whatever you’re pushing . . . “
So this Chase is precariously close to running aground on the same flaw as the old full-season championship system: If you take risks and put on the show–which is supposed to be the point of this exercise called “racing”–you fall by the wayside.
More Top Picks Best Wakeboards
You don’t even have to run particularly well–just stay out of trouble–to be crowned “champion.”
———-