Chase consensus: It’s wide open this year

Chase consensus: It’s wide open this year

By Reid Spencer
Sporting News NASCAR Wire Service

Even with a four-time champion apparently rounding into form and ready to unleash his best equipment for the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup, the drivers competing for this year’s title agree to a man that the Chase is more wide open than it has been since the start of the Jimmie Johnson dynasty.
“I think that I’m capable of winning it,” said Greg Biffle, driver of the No. 16 Roush Fenway Racing Ford. “I think Jeff Burton’s capable of winning it. I think Tony Stewart is capable of winning it. I could go down the list—you know what I mean?”
You might think the two drivers with the top two win totals this year would be the logical favorites. After all, Denny Hamlin accumulated 60 bonus points to start the Chase. After winning at Richmond, he enters the final 10 races 30 points ahead of regular-season leader Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch (three wins each) and 60 points ahead of the five drivers who have yet to win a race this year—Burton, Jeff Gordon, Carl Edwards, Matt Kenseth and Clint Bowyer.
Johnson, however, hasn’t won a race since he posted back-to-back victories at Sonoma and New Hampshire in June, his fourth and fifth wins of the season. After taking the checkered flag at Michigan, Hamlin endured a 10-race stretch peppered with reliability issues, the last of which—an engine failure at Atlanta—dropped him to 10th in the standings as the series headed for the final regular-season race at Richmond.
Edwards, on the other hand, led the series in points scored over the 10 races leading up to the Chase. Ever since the Roush Fenway cars began incorporating the front-end geometry from Richard Petty Motorsports, a Roush affiliate, Edwards and Biffle have gone from also-rans to frontrunners.
Neither can you ignore Harvick, whose consistency has kept him at the top of the standings for the 17 races preceding the Chase.
Burton believes the title will go to the team best able to turn up the wick when the Chase begins.
“Who’s going to step it up?” Burton asked. “What team is going to falter? We’ve seen, especially with Roush and with Tony Stewart’s deal, they’ve stepped it up right here at the right time. Can they continue that? Who is going to step it up? It’s ‘go’ time. And what teams are going to do it over the next 10 weeks, that’s a question none of us know.
“I think all 12 of those people could make a valid argument that they are the one that can step it up. That’s a looming question. Who is going to be able to go fast enough? Who consistently is going to be able to go fast?”