NASCAR Cup Series

Time to start racking up some wins

Published Aug. 13, 2009 7:59 p.m. ET

Larry McReynolds

These guys have to take these next four races one at a time. You have to focus and prepare each car for that next race. The good news for the teams is they get an off week right in the middle of these remaining four races before the Chase.

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Obviously we are getting more teams that, like Tony Stewart on Monday, are getting locked into the Chase. Those teams will then be focused on one thing. That would be winning, because in addition to everything else, winning gives you 10 bonus points once the Chase starts.

So we head back to Michigan this weekend. It's a wide two-mile race track. There is plenty of room to race and you have multiple grooves. We don't normally see big, bad crashes there. As we have seen in the past, as we saw in June and as I suspect we will see Sunday, fuel-mileage strategy will come into play.

Carl Edwards had one of his better runs in a long time Monday at Watkins Glen. Unfortunately it's not relative to anything. He can't transfer what information he learned from the road course to any other track that remains on the schedule this year. In 2008 one of the strong points for Carl and all the Roush Fenway cars were the 1.5-mile and 2-mile tracks. Unfortunately, this is 2009 and it's been one of their weakest areas.

The good news is that Carl is getting in pretty good shape to be locked in. I don't think they are sweating not making the Chase. I can bet you they really don't want to start the Chase with zero bonus points, though. Now, Carl's teammates, Greg Biffle and Matt Kenseth, are more concerned about having solid runs and making the Chase right now. It's still hard to believe that Roush Fenway won the first two races of the season and has been completely shut out ever since. To me, that is one of the biggest surprises of 2009.