Mark Wallheiser / Reuters

Tony Stewart's 43-point lead after the first seven races in the Chase playoff afforded him little comfort in his bid for a second Cup championship, writes Allen Bestwick of NBCSports.com.

Allen Bestwick

We're coming down the stretch in the Chase for the Nextel Cup championship and the pressure being felt by those drivers seeking the title has risen to its highest point in NASCAR's 10-race playoff.

Time not on their side
There’s pressure to perform on drivers every week and in every race. But as we get down to deciding just who the 2005 Nextel Cup champion will be, there a few reasons why that pressure jumps off the charts.

The first reason the heat gets turned up on the championship contenders in the final few races is that there is no longer any recovery time to make up for a bad day. A 10-race run for the championship is really quite a long time. In fact, the 10 races that comprise the Chase total more than a quarter of the entire season.

A problem in the first of those 10 races allows a reasonable nine-race stretch to try and make up the lost points. In a 10-race stretch it’s not out of the question for all of the title contenders to have at least one sub-par finish, but in the final few races it’s highly likely that all of the top drivers in the title hunt will run near the front and score decent finishes. That, after all, is how they got to be title contenders in the first place, by consistently finishing up front.

Since experiencing a problem is more likely over ten races than just a few, if you are the one title-contending driver who has a problem coming down the stretch you have little chance or opportunity to get back what was lost. With no time to recover from a problem, the pressure grows to not have a problem. Easier said than done.

Edge of control, edge of disaster
When you watch from the grandstands or on television, NASCAR drivers really make racing look easy. The cars zip around looking like slot cars, and they appear virtually stuck to the pavement. The picture from the on-board camera shows the driver, strapped in tight to his seat, looking like he’s just cruising around, totally in control. But appearances are very deceiving.

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If you’ve ever had the chance to drive or ride on the track in a Nextel Cup car, you know it’s far from a casual ride. The physical demands are enormous, and the mental concentration required is extreme.

Also the faster you go, the smaller the difference is between a successful corner and a crash. Today’s Cup cars literally run right on that edge, just a fraction of a bobble away from spinning out or crashing. The cars can literally dance around, darting six inches or a foot left or right while the driver isn’t turning the wheel an inch!

Add race traffic into the mix -- cars running at speeds in excess of 175 mph just inches apart -- and you come to see how little it really takes to start an accident, or be swept into one that another driver triggers.

At this point in the Chase a crash for any of the title contenders would be a points disaster, but a championship-seeking driver can’t slow down since all of the other contenders are going as fast as they can to leave him behind. The need to go fast but not crash becomes even more important than it has been all season.