Auto Racing Capsules: No clear-cut favorite for NASCAR championship

DOVER, Del. (AP) — Jimmie Johnson has yet to take off on his traditional run of Chase dominance. Tony Stewart has two wins in the 10-race postseason without a points lead to show for his checkered flags. Kyle Busch's four wins in the first 26 races have meant nothing the last three weeks.

Three races into the Chase for the Sprint Cup , no clear-cut favorite has emerged out of the pack of 12. The standings are so tight entering the fourth Chase race this weekend at Kansas Speedway that there's a tie at the top. Kevin Harvick and Carl Edwards have the same number of points — but Harvick holds the tiebreaker because of his four season victories compared with Edwards' one.

The top eight drivers are separated by only 15 points — the top nine by 19.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. is in serious trouble, and Ryan Newman and Denny Hamlin are the bottom two drivers and can start planning for next season. With seven races left, the Chase is wide open.

"I think the competition level is so even," Harvick said. "I don't think you're going to see anybody come in here and dominate like you have, as far as just taking off and running away. It's just a matter of keeping yourself in it until you get to the last couple of races. If you can keep yourself in contention, hopefully you've eliminated most of the other guys in the Chase."

The revamped points system has tightened the field and made serious swings in the standings possible. Johnson went from 10th place and 29 points behind the leader entering Dover to fifth place and 13 points out after a second-place finish to Kurt Busch on the Monster Mile. Busch's victory moved him from ninth to fourth in the standings, only nine points behind Harvick and Edwards.

More changes are ahead at Kansas. Stewart, Johnson, Newman, Brad Keselowski and Jeff Gordon all have won races at Kansas.

Harvick, whose best Kansas finish was a third in 2010, considers himself a contender to race into Victory Lane even with a 14.3 average finish at the 1.5-mile speedway.

"Right now, we are looking for a championship, so whatever we have got to do to fight through that is what we'll do," he said. "You need to run good at all of them. You can't run bad at any of them, to tell you the truth, but Kansas has been a place where we have been pretty good."

After Johnson's mediocre — by his standards — start to the Chase, some thought his five-year run atop the Cup standings was over. But the Hendrick Motorsports driver proved he will always be a threat for the title and saw his bid for another win at Dover throttled only by a pair of poor restarts against Kurt Busch late in the race. It may have cost him the race, but he thrust himself back into the championship picture.

"The Chase is so tough to know what it's going to take," Johnson said. "We look at the 14 car and what he did in the first two races and then he struggles. I think it speaks to how tough these 10 races are going to be and how you think somebody is one fire and the fire can go out."

Stewart had smoked the field with Chase-opening wins at Chicagoland and New Hampshire, using a strong car and fuel mileage to outlast, as much as outclass, the rest of the field.

At Dover, it all fell apart. He could never get it going on the track, from practice to qualifying to racing 400 miles on the concrete. He entered in first place with a seven-point lead in the standings and left nine points back and in third after he finished 25th.

Edwards, a Columbia, Mo., native, was one pit road speeding penalty from winning at Dover. The winner of one race and the All-Star race, Edwards led the standings for 14 weeks and hopes a win on the closest thing he has to a home track can be the big momentum builder toward his first championship.

"I've been trying to think about that, trying to win more so we can get more points," Edwards said. "But it's been a good season.

It just won't be a great one until he's the champion.

For Edwards — or the rest of the talented contenders.

Glance at the 12 drivers in the Chase

A glance at the 12 drivers competing in NASCAR's Chase for the Sprint Cup championship heading into this weekend's race at Kansas (in order of points):

DRIVER: Kevin Harvick

Viewed trackside, it looks more like rush-hour traffic putzing along Interstate 10.

Then you realize you were the slowest of your group and that it was probably closer to the speed of a horse-drawn carriage than Jimmie Johnson.

Sadly, that's what happened during a recent eight-lap run with the Richard Petty Driving Experience at Phoenix International Raceway.

Given a chance to test out the new surface at PIR's 1-mile oval, I failed. Miserably.

I've topped 115 mph on the open highway, plowed through blizzards with one-foot drifts, whipped through roundabouts in Paris with ease.

Get behind the wheel of Sprint Cup car, one of the most powerful cars in the world, one that some might give up an organ for a chance to drive, and I putter around like one of those brake-heavy snowbirds who travel down from the north to fill Arizona's roads every winter.

The biggest reason: driving one of these beasts is disorienting.

It may look easy watching Johnson, Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr. race around in circles on TV, but nothing about being behind the wheel of a Sprint Cup car is comfortable.

It starts with the fire suit.

Besides making you look drop-dead sexy, they're uncomfortable, sweat lodge hot and not exactly form fitting. Maybe I got one that was too small, but I felt like someone had hiked me up from behind and was carrying me around by the seat of my pants.

After that, you put on a moon-sized helmet that tests your neck strength, then get strapped into the HANS device, which gives you sort of a Star Wars look, not to mention making it hard to turn your head. The full-body turn to look at someone becomes a must.

Any racing fan knows that the doors don't open on Sprint Cup cars, but they may not know that climbing through that window with a giant bulb on your head feels like that time you locked your keys in the house and got stuck in the dog door.

The driver's compartment looks as if someone randomly welded a bunch of metal together and has the claustrophobic feel of a being shoved into a foot locker. It feels even tighter when they attach the steering wheel, which, in itself, takes a little getting used to — as in, is that thing going to stay attached?

The windshield is smaller than you'd expect and the rearview mirror is distorted, like something you'd imagine Benjamin Franklin used while shaving.

The waiver form didn't help, either. Filled with legalese and about 50 places to initial and sign, it's much easier to just scribble your signature quickly across the pages without reading the fine print.

You're driving a race car, so pretty much figure it says "You may get maimed or killed and we're not responsible."

Once you get going, the concentration level gets ratcheted up exponentially.

There's no fiddling with the radio or texting while driving one of these. From the moment you hear the roar of the engine and feel that 600-horsepower machine vibrating underneath you, you're locked in, the rest of the outside world blacked out.

As they said in the safety and instruction meeting before the session, the key to driving in the Richard Petty Driving Experience is all about three things: distance — three car lengths — driving line and speed.

For me, it was fail, fail, fail.

The lead cars have a green light on the right telling you when to speed up and a yellow on the left when you get too close.

My problem was getting past the feeling that the car was going to slide off the track.

Conventional wisdom tells you to slow down on corners, but with a Sprint Cup car, you want to accelerate about halfway through the turn to build speed for the straightaway. PIR also isn't a perfect oval and the slight dogleg — with a slight dip — requires a little more thought than just racing out of the turn into a straightaway.

So while the lead car was accelerating through the dogleg, I was still geared back on the throttle, in cornering mode as that green light kept flashing: "Keep up, idiot!"

Line? I was below the lead driver pretty much the whole way, in a don't-slide-into-the-wall frame of mind, particularly when he rode up tight to the wall on the straightaways.

After about six laps that felt like 20, I started to get the hang of it and stayed with the lead driver, on a decent line while building some speed in the straightaway.

I felt pretty good after squeezing through a worm hole to get out of the car, the exhilaration washing over me as I talked about the ride with other members of the group.

The ecstasy ended when we got our final reports.

While most of the people in the group were bragging about top speeds of over 100 mph — former Arizona Cardinals linebacker Andre Wadsworth, despite barely being able to get into the car, had the top time at 104 — I looked into my packet and saw a wimpy little number: 93.

Now, 93 mph is still pretty fast in the grand scheme of things, but it wasn't exactly what I had in mind when I signed up to drive a Sprint Cup car. It was worse when I looked at my average speed of 77 mph and realized it was less than my average speed on drives to Tucson for University of Arizona games.

When I they handed out certificates for completing the course, I couldn't help thinking my name should have been spelled L-A-M-E.

I still couldn't shake it as we walked to our real cars. After one of the group lamented how he had just missed hitting 100 mph, I tried to put up a cool front, saying I hadn't even looked at mine as the sad truth flapped in my hand behind cover of an envelope.

Driving a Sprint Cup car is certainly an eye-opening experience, one that provides a greater appreciation for what the big boys do with those monster machines.

OK, so this is coming from the perspective of someone who drives a boxy SUV, but I can at least say it's nothing like driving on the freeway.

Even with my light-footed attempt, it was an amazing experience — and I want another shot.

John Marshall covers sports for The Associated Press.

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