High, Wide and Handsome

In the aftermath of the IRWIN Tools Night Race at Bristol, there are just two chances left for the Chase field to change.

The first is Sunday night at Atlanta Motor Speedway, when the field gets down and dirty on one of the fastest tracks they race on. The last is at Richmond, in this writer’s opinion the best facility the series visits in terms of racing.

Bristol last weekend was supposed to winnow the field even further, but it didn’t do much. All that happened was that Brad Keselowski can now rest easy in terms of qualifying, with his third victory of the season and several other drivers clinched their spots.

For those on the ragged edge, it was a night to forget.

Tony Stewart has dodged more bullets than Superman, but the way things are going, the next one might snuff out his chances at the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup.

Keselowski just keeps winning races, and he’s cutting down the points margin between himself and Stewart, who is clinging tenaciously to the 10th and final spot among automatic qualifiers to the Chase.

Stewart? The man who has won a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series event every year since 1999 has not sniffed Victory Lane in a very long time, and the way his car is running these days, it’s going to be a while before another whiff wafts on the winds.

The odd thing is, when Stewart won the second of his two titles, he did so with a summer run that included a stretch of five victories in seven races. That burst effectively clinched the title for Stewart before the Chase ever started.

Keselowski, who has won twice since breaking his left ankle in a crash during testing at Road Atlanta, is in a run of first-second-third-first in the last four races. Does this sound familiar?

True, he’s 13th in the points and just about a mortal lock to make the Chase as a wild-card. Unless David Ragan or Denny Hamlin win the next two races, he’s in solid in 11th place.

Or, as it happens, he might just remove all that wild-card talk and just get in by being in the top 10 in points.

That brings us back to Stewart.

While Keselowski was winning at Bristol, Stewart was going through a miserable time on the .533-mile high-banked oval. He ended up 28th, several laps down.

A trend is developing.

Stewart and his team can’t find the sweet spot on his No. 14 Chevrolet.

 Not even with a miner’s helmet, GPS and two hands. It’s that simple. The balance is off, and if the balance is off, the performance is off. If performance is off, the points stop coming.

When the points stop coming, you watch the final 10 races of the season as an interested by-stander, not a title contender.

Stewart didn’t have the mojo working when he got to Bristol, and by the time he left, late Saturday night, it was still long gone, into the east Tennessee mist. Nothing worked, nothing made it any better and nothing came of the effort.

“It was better than it was shaping up to be yesterday,” a subdued Stewart said later. “Thanks to our teammates for the help that we got from them that definitely made us better for sure. [It was] just a rough night. [We] struggled through.”

That about sums it up.

How does this kind of thing happen in the level-playing-field of the modern-day NASCAR?

Easy. Everything just seems to…work out.

“A team that just starts to click and believes in each other,” Keselowski said. “I believed in Paul (Wolfe) since we started this year and we've just made good adjustments to our cars over the last few months. We made good adjustments to our car today and we find ourselves in Victory Lane. I can't believe it, I really can't.”

It was that was for Stewart back in 2005. He won at Sonoma, he won at Indy, he won at Watkins Glen. It just all clicked. They didn’t come up with something outside-the-box. There was no magic bullet.

It was just a confluence of events, in which everything that could have turned to mud in a heartbeat…didn’t.

That’s the way it starts. How it ends is anybody’s guess, but right now, Keselowski and the rest of the Miller Lite Dodge team are the team to beat. No one is running better, and a whole bunch of them are running much worse.

It’s the time of year when it’s best for that to happen, and it’s Keselowski that has the mojo.

All Stewart has right now is voodoo. Sure, he’s still 21 points ahead of Keselowski in the race for the 10th spot, so he’s technically still in the Chase. For how long remains to be seen.

Asked about his chances of making it in, Stewart shrugged.

“It is no different than it was last week,” he said. “The feeling is the same way, you still want to make it. We’re working hard at it.”

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