Stewart is sitting pretty, but future plans uncertain
NASCAR has reset the standings, and Jeff Gordon, despite dominating the Nextel Cup tour all season and racking up a 300-plus points lead, finds himself running behind teammate Jimmie Johnson as the 10-race Chase for the Championship begins here this weekend.
Jeff Gordon, Johnson and Tony Stewart are the favorites to win it all, but Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin and Kurt Busch all bear watching, too.
Tony Stewart missed the Chase cut last year, but he played the spoiler with three wins.
“It’s a reality check how easy it is to get yourself in position where you can miss the Chase,” Tony Stewart said. “It shows the quality of team we’ve got, after a disappointment like last year, to come back and finish the regular season second in points.”
It might seem strange to consider Tony Stewart an outside shot in the Chase, because he’s a two-time Cup champion and easily one of the two or three best drivers on the tour. But he’s currently on the hot seat with car owner Joe Gibbs’ defection from Chevrolet to Toyota, and he’s also embroiled in negotiations for an extension of his contract with Gibbs.
Tony Stewart still has two years remaining on his current contract, but he and Gibbs and crew chief Greg Zipadelli have been talking all season about rewriting that contract to run another three years beyond that.
General Motors executives said they would like a crack at getting Tony Stewart back in their camp when his contract with Gibbs expires.
Still, Tony Stewart comes here with six top-threes and nine top-fives in his 17 career starts at New Hampshire International Speedway, a flat one-mile track.
How well Jack Roush’s two Ford drivers, Matt Kenseth and Carl Edwards, may fare is hard to predict. Kenseth has been very consistent, but not very fast this season. Edwards, on the other hand, has hit his stride, but consistency isn’t his strong suit.
There are big question marks hanging over car owner Richard Childress’ three entries, Kevin Harvick, Jeff Burton and Clint Bowyer. Something just doesn’t seem quite right in that camp, although Kevin Harvick has been the tour’s best finisher, 7,311 of the season’s 7,399 laps.
The points spread between leader Johnson and 12th-place Bowyer is only 60 - the difference between finishing first on Sunday and finishing 11th, which isn’t much at all.
But then that’s the whole point of the Chase - to keep someone such as Jeff Gordon from taking away any suspense from the final third of the season, a very important part of the Cup tour in NASCAR’s battle for TV ratings.
When NASCAR’s Cup tour was flying high, about two years ago, springtime ratings were high. But even then, the fall segment has always been tougher, as NBC found out during its six years before turning this sport over to ABC-ESPN this season.
But ABC and NASCAR still face a troublesome start to the Chase, with its first two races at Loudon and Dover, two less-than-famous sports venues, certainly without the cache of Los Angeles, Chicago or even Miami.
In fact, if TV were lining up the Chase schedule, there would undoubtedly be some major changes, dropping the minor markets that simply don’t sell that well and adding big markets. For example, why NASCAR insists on running its second Los Angeles race in 112-degree heat over Labor Day, before the Chase at that, and not set it somewhere in the heart of the Chase is still surprising.
Certainly, though, NASCAR can’t be faulted for who has wound up in Victory Lane so far - 14 different drivers in 26 races. Of course, the Rick Hendrick camp has had more than its share of those wins, including a run of five in a row.
