NASCAR Cup Series

Junior crew chief: All you can do in these rounds 'is lose championship'

Published Oct. 4, 2014 1:53 p.m. ET

Jared Turner

Sunday's race at Kansas Speedway kicks off the Contender Round of the Chase for the Sprint Cup, which began with 16 drivers but now features 12 who will battle over the next three weeks to be among the eight title contenders still alive when the Eliminator Round commences Oct. 26 at Martinsville Speedway.

Already gone from the championship mix are four drivers -- Aric Almirola, Greg Biffle, AJ Allmendinger and Kurt Busch -- who failed to advance from the three-race Challenger Round to the Contender Round.

So with the weakest links now out of title contention, do the remaining Chase drivers have as much margin for error in the Contender Round as the Challenger Round?

Common sense suggests they don't, which can only mean one thing: Drivers and teams who may have sandbagged a bit to play it safe in the first round are going to be forced to turn it up a notch beginning with Sunday's Contender Round opener at Kansas.

And that, of course, means more drivers and teams willing to take more risks and bigger risks.

"Fifteenths or better for the first round -- we did what we needed to do with results a little bit better than that," said Chase driver Kyle Busch. "Then, probably, you have to have top 10s or better in the Contender Round to be able to move on to the next one if you don't have wins. From there, it's just going to get tougher."

While the three drivers who won in the Challenger Round -- Brad Keselowski, Joey Logano and Jeff Gordon -- clearly weren't holding much of anything back, the same wasn't necessarily true for everyone.

Crew chief Steve Letarte, for example, made that clear after driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. finished 11th in the Chase opener at Chicagoland Speedway, where the team used a conservative pit strategy and ultimately gave up several positions in the closing laps.

"All you can do in these first three is lose the championship," Letarte said of the races in the Challenger Round. "You can't win one."

That statement no doubt carries over to this round as well.

Keselowski, meanwhile, doesn't necessarily buy the idea that some drivers and teams deliberately throttled back in the Challenger Round.

"I don't think there's anybody playing possum," he said. "I don't see that. If it's there, it's very light. I don't think I'm that worried about that."

Either way, there is undoubtedly less room for mistakes in the Contender Round than there were in the Challenger Round, which had more drivers but a lower percentage of legitimate title contenders.

"You always want to do the best you can, but certainly, you could have more of a mulligan in the first round than you can as you move on, for sure," said championship hopeful Matt Kenseth. "You could have some trouble (then) and rebound from it."

A driver could probably move on with three mediocre finishes in the Challenger Round. But not in this one. Furthermore, a really poor finish in any of the three Contender Round races -- Kansas, Charlotte and Talladega -- would likely require a driver to win one of the other two events to advance.

That makes the pressure to run well in Sunday's Hollywood Casino 400 extraordinarily high for all 16 Chase drivers, who enter the race in a 16-way tie for the points lead after the points were reset following last weekend's Challenger Round finale at Dover.

"You have to be very smart," said Chase driver Carl Edwards. "Let me say that a better way: I think with this format, you have to be able to very quickly alter your strategy and your willingness to take risks or not take risks. After one pit-stop exchange, one yellow flag, the field can be changed around where you basically have to have a statistician -- a person there saying, 'Hey, this is the position we're in. This is how we have to race.' You have to be able to change like that, and so for that reason, it's really tough."

And the further into a round they go, the more likely drivers are going to be to push the envelope.

"I think desperation is going to change everything," Busch said. "What you've got to do is going to be anything you can do. If you're going to go four wide or five wide at Talladega in order to get yourself in a spot that's going to be able to make you transfer through (to the next Chase round) and take yourself a chance of crashing, you're going to do it. You've got to. So it's all about trying to make it through to the final round."

VIDEO: Jeff Gordon interview from Chase Contender Media Day