Wide Open

Kyle Busch is putting together the kind of late-season run that we usually see from Jimmie Johnson, putting some sizzle in what is usually a snoozefest at Michigan International Speedway.

Busch won for the first time in the Irish Hills, first running down the leader, Johnson, and then holding the lead on a green-white-checkered restart with three to go. In the process, he jazzed up the usual fuel-mileage-is-king, dare-not-pit-late-because-of-track-position affair.

Problems for Carl Edwards, who went to the garage early on with an unspecified engine malady, and Denny Hamlin, who scraped the wall and lost laps getting it fixed, cost both drivers.

It cost Hamlin more, dropping him two spots to 14th in the points, 59 out of 10th. He is still, for the moment, the last wild-card, but he’s just 18 points ahead of Paul Menard among those in the top 20 with at least one victory.

The fact that there is a wild-card race is adding much-needed emphasis to a race where, in most years, you set a wake-up call for lap 180 and see who emerges as the winner. The way Brad Keselowski is running, there’s a feeling he’ll be out of the wild-card race in short order and into the top 10.

Tony Stewart, who finished ninth, was frustrated with a capital F after the race, even though he’s 24 points up on Keselowski with three races to go to the Chase.

"I will be perfectly honest, at this point of the deal, if we are going to run this bad, it really doesn't matter whether we make the Chase or not because we are going to be occupying a spot in the Chase that somebody else that actually can run for a championship is going to be trying take because our stuff is so bad right now,” he said on pit road. “We're wasting one of those top-12 spots right now."

Smoke gets that way once in a while, and he and crew chief Darian Grubb can’t find the sweet spot to make the car balanced. After getting caught in the remnants of the last-lap crash at Watkins Glen on Monday, he’s hanging on to the top 10 by his fingernails.

He and Dale Earnhardt Jr., who is ninth in the points, six ahead of Stewart, are the only drivers in the current top 12 without a victory. Earnhardt Jr. has not won since Michigan in 2008, nearly 1,100 days ago.

That’s a concern.

Especially since this weekend’s race is at Bristol, where the racing is pretty hot, usually, and the opportunity to step in a huge pile of trouble is magnified.

Bristol, Atlanta and Richmond all offer significant chances to either gain a little bit of ground or lose gobs of it, and that’s where we sit with three to go to the Chase.

Keselowski is on a string of 1-2-3 in finishes, and Bristol is not his best track, but then, neither was Pocono. Atlanta…we really don’t want to go there, do we? Richmond? Eh… But he has momentum and that is something that Hamlin, Stewart and Earnhardt sorely lack at this time.

The top six or seven are set, as of this writing, and there’s a keen battle for the final five spots. If David Ragan or Paul Menard win again, Hamlin is toast. If he keeps running like this, Stewart will be watching from the sidelines, and so will Earnhardt.

Bristol is a track where one driver tends to lead all the laps, and if he doesn’t win, it’s usually because of contact late. Kyle Busch is pretty good there, as is Jeff Gordon. Kevin Harvick is not bad there, but Kurt Busch and Carl Edwards are other-worldly there.

Hamlin runs well there, and he’ll have to. Clint Bowyer is indifferent there, but capable of running well.

We’re just going to have to see what shakes out in Thunder Valley…it could be cataclysmic.

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