Perfection the goal in NASCAR's Chase for the Sprint Cup

RICHMOND, Va. — Kyle Busch sat on pit road sharing Life Savers with teammate Matt Kenseth, mulling his chances of repeating as Sprint Cup champion.

He wasn’t really sure, even though Joe Gibbs Racing and affiliate Furniture Row Racing had won 13 of 26 regular-season races after teammate Denny Hamlin crossed the finish line first at Richmond International Raceway, leading 189 laps. Martin Truex Jr., of Furniture Row, was third after leading another 193 of the 407-lap event. JGR Toyotas had been the force of the regular season, but next was a whole new realm: the Chase for the Sprint Cup.

It’s the place that each one of them hoped to reach when the season began. But it will be different, if two years of history is enough of a sample, than the NASCAR regular season. It will smear clean the proverbial tabulation of what they have accomplished so far — with the exception of the extra points their wins apply to first-round seeding — and it will subject them to what can be a random and ruthless postseason.

“I don’t think there’s a particular way of figuring out how to do it. Obviously, win,” Busch said. “That’s probably the best way to do it. You look at guys like (Kevin) Harvick (finishing 42nd in the Chase opener) last year at Chicago. He won Dover and was able to transfer his way through. We had trouble at Loudon but we had two of three good races and got our way through. It’s luck, too, you’ve got to be able to go to Talladega and be able to get through that one. Any man can win this, really.”

Busch begins his title defense seeded first, with Hamlin third, Carl Edwards fifth, Truex sixth and Kenseth seventh. Truex advanced to the Homestead-Miami Speedway final last year with Furniture Row then utilizing Chevrolets before aligning with JGR and Toyota Racing Development. This season, he said, his No. 78 team has acquired the missing element: speed.

“Having that speed on the race track is the No. 1 goal all the time as a racer, but that doesn’t guarantee you anything,” he said. “You still want to do all the little things right. We were able to take our little team last year all the way to Homestead when really everybody had us counted out not far after the first round was over. You’ve gotta execute. You can’t have any bad luck. You have to (have) all the little things right, but when it comes down to Homestead, you’ve got to have that speed.”

If there is a book on it after two seasons, it’s written in pencil. Except for one line.

“There are a bunch of things you have to do right, but the thing with a three-round Chase or a three-race round is that one mistake, one problem, one penalty, it can really set you back,” Edwards said. “It’s very easy to screw it up I guess, so  I don’t know that there’s a book on how to do, exactly how to do it, other than don’t make mistakes. Don’t put yourself in a hole. I think that’s the key, especially these early rounds. It’s very easy to fall out. We saw some really good cars out after the first round last year.”

So even though Edwards and his Joe Gibbs Racing teammates were oppressive in the Federated Auto Parts 400, there is no guarantee of a carryover. Harvick began the 2014 Chase seeded fourth and won the title, but Busch rose from a three-way tie for first entering the playoffs last season to win his first championship at NASCAR’s highest level. Harvick won the last two races of the season to qualify for and win the final, while Busch’s run was helped immeasurably by Joey Logano being eradicated by a vengeful Kenseth.

“I think this is going to be a battle,” team owner Joe Gibbs said. “I think the other thing, there's no way that you can I think pick a favorite right now because it's really three‑race playoffs.

“We saw in our history Denny's been knocked out, Kyle's been knocked out with just kind of weird things that happen. You can't afford a bad race.  And so I feel like what we tried to do this year, I watch the crew chiefs, drivers and everybody, we just try to go every week and be as good as we could be and race as hard as we could.”

Unless this Chase somehow crams five drivers into the four-race Homestead finale, the postseason tournament is unlikely to be representative of the season so far.

“I mean, it’s interesting. NASCAR … they’ve found a way to take a very long season full of very long races and then condense it down into a real sprint,” Edwards said. “It goes by in a flash, those three-race rounds.

“We found ourselves last year at Phoenix and we were one lap from going back green and having a chance to try to put ourselves in that final round at Homestead. The rain came and we were done. I could go back even in that race and the two races before that and I can find a couple points that we should have gotten and it would have gave us a chance to race for the championship. It’s just so easy to give it away, but that’s what makes it fun. You’ve got to really be perfect and everybody else is trying hard.”

Finally, the book: perfection.

JGR’s pursuit of it in the regular season has the rest of the field literally feeling surrounded.

“They’ve been strong,” said Kurt Busch, who qualified for the Chase in a Stewart-Haas Racing Chevrolet. “They’ve been strong all year. I was making a joke, like a Dr. Seuss book: One Toyota, two Toyota, three Toyota five. They’re just everywhere.”