We’re only four races into NASCAR’s 10-race Chase for the Cup and already half of the dozen drivers in the Chase are longshots to win the championship.
Tony Stewart won the fourth race Sunday at Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway and climbed to seventh from 11th in the standings. Yet he’s still a distant 203 points behind leader Jimmie Johnson.
“We could still by theory win the next six races in a row and still not win the point championship,” Stewart said after winning.
That’s because Johnson and the other drivers ahead of him will be tough to dislodge from the standings unless they have a string of poor finishes, an unlikely scenario.
Even the typical wildness at Talladega didn’t change the standings much.
Stewart’s Toyota was the top survivor at the high-banked, 2.66-mile track where, to no one’s surprise, there were multi-car crashes that collected several Chasers.
They included Carl Edwards, Jeff Gordon, Kevin Harvick, Matt Kenseth, Dale Earnhardt Jr. — and Greg Biffle, who won the first two Chase races in Loudon, N.H., and Dover, Del.
Yet the top four Chase drivers coming into Talladega are still the top four. Johnson — who won the third Chase race at Kansas a week earlier — leads Edwards by 72 points, Biffle by 77 and Jeff Burton by 99. And for the drivers fifth through 12th, winning the Chase this year looks increasingly remote, even if they’re still mathematically alive.
