Allen Bestwick

Tension. That’s the word that comes to mind when I look at the championship standings with just five races remaining before the cutoff date for qualifying for The Chase for the Nextel Cup Championship.

The field of contenders for the 10-race playoff to determine the Cup champion will be set after the race at Richmond International Raceway on Sept. 10.

The top 10 drivers in the championship standings and any other drivers within 400 points of the leader qualify for the Chase.

I expect just the top 10 drivers in the standings to be championship eligible although I won't rule out another driver or two making it into the playoff by finishing inside the 400-point window of the top spot.

That’s where the tension comes in as drivers try and figure out if they are safely in the Chase, realistically out of it, or in it for now but at risk of falling out before the cutoff date.

Who’s Out
It looks to me like this year’s Chase will not include the sport’s most popular driver or the 2003 Cup champion.

When Dale Earnhardt Jr. wound up smashing his car into the frontstretch pit wall at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Aug. 7 after being rammed from behind by another car, his  hopes of making the Chase were crushed right along with the car’s sheet metal.

Junior is 191 points out of 10th place entering the road-course race at Watkins Glen this Sunday.

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With five races left before the Chase qualifying cutoff date, Junior would have to gain an average of 38.2 points on 10th place each week.

For perspective, 38 points is the difference between winning and 7th place. It is also the difference between finishing 15th and 28th, or 30th and 43rd.

Here’s the bigger problem: It’s not just the 10th-place driver that Junior would have to outpoint, he’ll also have to outscore all the other drivers currently between himself and 10th place -- drivers like Jeff Gordon, Kevin Harvick, Elliott Sadler and Jamie McMurray.

So Junior has to outrun all of those drivers, and outrun them by several positions per race, while having no off days, crashes or flat tires.

Good luck.

Many people wonder how the sizeable number of Junior fans will react if the sport’s most popular driver is not in the Chase. Well, we’re about to find out.

Those same numbers that don’t add up for Junior also don’t work for the 2003 Cup champion, Matt Kenseth.

Entering this weekend's race, Kenseth is 168 points out of 10th place.

He needs to outscore those drivers ahead of him in the standings by an average of 33.6 points per race over the next five races, and he also has no margin for error.

If Kenseth indeed fails to make the Chase, a slow start to 2005 will certainly be lamented by the driver and his team.

Through the year’s opening 12 races, Kenseth scored just a single top-10 finish, certainly not championship form.

Things have turned around lately, with six top-10 finishes in the last nine races.

Having climbed from 24th in the standings to 15th over that time, Kenseth’s team has regained the form we’ve come to expect from them over the past few years, but gaining 33 points per race on that many drivers is a tall hill to climb.

Who’s In
This is a much harder side of the coin to call since it’s far easier to lose points to the field than it is to gain them.

That said, I think the top three drivers in the standings entering the race at Watkins Glen this weekend are pretty well locked in and will be part of the Chase come September.

The key number to these drivers is their gap ahead of 11th place.

Tony Stewart, the new leader in the championship standings, is 448 points ahead of 11th place with five races to go, so he would have to lose nearly 90 points per race to end up out of the Chase.

The maximum point swing in each race from first to last is 156 points, so Stewart would have to lose all of the points he possibly could in three of the remaining five races to just come close to not making the cut.

So I believe he’s in.

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