It's 10 to the 10. Ten Sprint Cup races remain before the 10-race Chase begins.
Make your run now or forget about a 2009 championship. What are we likely to see in this 10-race stretch?
Judging by last season, this could be the Kyle and Carl show. Kyle Busch and Carl Edwards each won three races in the 10 events leading up to the 2008 Chase.
Jimmie Johnson also won three times in the 10 summer races last year, but one of those was at Auto Club Speedway, which has been moved to a Chase event.
Busch and Edwards could use hot streaks. Busch hasn't posted a top-10 in the past four races. His average finish over that stretch is 20th.
He ranks ninth in the standings, but he's only 48 points ahead of Kasey Kahne in 13th.
Busch needs a repeat of his 2008 summer run. He won at Daytona and Chicago back-to-back, and also finished first on the Watkins Glen road course.
He finished first or second in five of the 10 summer races, posting top-15s in nine of those events. A little déjà vu would go a long way toward securing his playoff spot. But Busch honestly points out that the No. 18 Toyota isn't running the way it did a year ago.
"The only way to bring yourself up in the points is to run better," Busch said. "Our cars aren't as good as they were last year. I feel like we've been struggling in some areas. We need to get our cars a bit better. We're focused on that.
"Hopefully, the meeting that we had before Sonoma will solve some of that so we can learn from some of the mistakes and get ourselves back up there."
Busch already has three victories this season, so one or two more in this 10-race stretch could place him on top of the standings when the Chase begins. Drivers are seeded by the number of wins they earn in the regular season.
Edwards would appreciate any victory at this point. He's winless in 2009 compared to three victories at this point a year ago.
Edwards is securely inside the Chase 12 (ranking fifth heading to New Hampshire this weekend), but he'll start last in the playoff unless he earns a win or two this summer.
Edwards won at Pocono, Michigan and Bristol last August. He also won at Atlanta in October, but that event now is Labor Day weekend, so Edwards has four races where he won a year ago in the next 10.
Unlike Busch, Edwards has run well over the last month, posting four consecutive finishes in the top seven before a 13th-place showing at Sonoma last weekend.
But the New Hampshire one-mile oval is not a place where he has run well, earning only one top-10 in his last eight starts at Loudon.
"We need to continue to build [on the last five races] and improve each week," Edwards said. "Loudon is the first track we race in the Chase, so we need to learn all that we can this weekend and apply it to the race in September."
Ten races left to make the 10-race Chase. Busch, Edwards and everyone else know it's time to show what they've got.
Terry Blount
