Charting the Chase: Kurt climbs; Jr., J.J. slip

With six events to go in the 15-man race to the 12-man Chase for the Nextel Cup, it's not going to come down to which teams outperformed the other teams. It will come down to which teams dodge the bad-luck bullet.

 

Jimmie Johnson is still semi-safe for making the Chase, but he can't stand many more races like he had at Chicagoland and Indianapolis. At Chicago, he had a car that could have beaten eventual race winner Tony Stewart, but he cut down a tire and hit the wall pretty hard. The No. 48 team missed the setup the entire weekend at Indy, but they were having a typical day. They took what was barely a top 20 car, and they were turning it into a top 10 finisher. But they got caught in a wreck and the left front fender cut down another tire, causing a pretty scary and fiery crash.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. hasn't been running poorly. He had great cars at Chicagoland and Indianapolis. They may have gotten off a little bit on strategy during the middle part of the race and were having a tough time overcoming it, but he had top 10 cars both weeks. However, the results were much different with a power steering problem at Chicagoland and an engine failure at Indy.

The only saving grace for Earnhardt Jr. is he's still 12th, and two of the three guys behind him had big problems, too. If we were doing colored charts like I used to do on Totally NASCAR, Jamie McMurray would be blue turning red because he's just about taken himself out of the Race to the Chase. We're just about ready to say it's a 14-man race for 12 spots. I still believe that Ryan Newman is in this thing, but the drivers in the top 12 better not take their eyes off of Kurt Busch.

 

 

Dodge in different directions

Kasey Kahne was on SPEED's Trackside last week, and he talked about Evernham Motorsports calling an audible. Starting at Indy and for the remaining non-COT races, the organization has gone back to its 2006 package. Were they going to be any better and different at Indy? Only they know how they felt about their stuff. Kahne had a decent qualifying run, though, nothing on Sunday made me jump for joy and say that they've solved their problems. But they needed to do something. If you come back with the same stuff each week — maybe with just a little fine tune here and a little fine tune there — you're going to get the same results.

The irony is that a year ago, the Penske and Petty teams were zigging and zagging with the 2006 Charger and the 2005 Intrepid while Ray Evernham stuck with the 2006 Charger as the No. 9 car kicked everybody's tail. Now, it looks like the No. 2 and the No. 12 and the Ganassi car have figured out the 2007 Charger while Evernham and the No. 9 team in particular have been struggling their guts out so they went back to the 2006 Charger. In my 18 years as a crew chief, I always found that when it looks like a make or model isn't running well, some team and driver always makes an exception. The No. 9 was the exception last year.

I was really proud of Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates at Indy. When Reed Sorenson and Juan Pablo Montoya qualified on the front row, the feeling throughout the garage area and maybe even in the media was, "I wonder how long it'll take them to drop like a rock." But running in the top 5 or 10 all day and coming home with two top five finishes at, of all places Indy, has to be a big shot in the arm. People talk about how important Indy is to Penske. Well, it's pretty important to Ganassi too because his team has run and won the Indianapolis 500 so that had to be a huge weekend for the whole Ganassi group.

 

HotPass is the hot ticket

Before I covered Tony Stewart on DirecTV's HotPass at Indianapolis, I spent a lot of time talking with Steve Byrnes, who has done two or three of races, and they were good enough to give me a DVD of the Richmond race in which Doug Rice and Hermie Sadler covered Jeff Burton and Kevin Harvick. I went to Indy with a lot of anticipation and fear of the unknown, but I had an absolute blast.

I'm sure it helps when your car runs as well as the No. 20 did from the drop of the green flag and ends up winning the race. It was very different from anything I've done. As a broadcaster on SPEED, FOX or Turner — whether it's practice, qualifying or the race — we have to be very unbiased. When you do DirecTV's HotPass, you become like the home team broadcaster. When he's up, you're up. When he's down, you're kind of down, but there weren't a lot of downs for Stewart on Sunday. You work your guts out. When I left that booth, jumped in the rental car, scurried to the airport, got on the airplane, sat down and breathed for the first time, I said, "I am whipped." It's basically a two-man broadcast for 3 to 3 1/2 hours, following one team and one team only, but I did enjoy it. I won't do another one until Bristol, but now that I have another one under my belt, I'm looking forward to doing more.