A three-man race is placed in jeopardy by the Chase

RICHMOND, Va. -- Kurt Busch claimed the opener and held on. Tony Stewart didn't win a race. Jimmie Johnson climbed out of a deep hole one year, and grabbed it by the throat the next. Four years, four Chases, and four very different methods of winning NASCAR's playoff system. The only common thread is the driver at the end of it clutching a big trophy, and then a few weeks later clutching an even bigger check.

The 2008 version of NASCAR's championship shootout begins next weekend, featuring the 12 drivers who secure berths after Sunday's regular-season finale at Richmond International Raceway. Conventional wisdom holds that this is a race between the three who have dominated this season -- Kyle Busch, Carl Edwards and Jimmie Johnson, who between them have won 17 of 25 races, and at this point are the only Chase-bound competitors with multiple victories. Right now, it seems they're the ones one capable of winning the Sprint Cup crown in the way Johnson did it last year, by winning several events once the playoff started and setting a bar too high for anyone else to reach.

Sure, Johnson won it last year by unleashing a savage stretch run on his opponents, and by any rational estimation only three drivers appear capable of replicating that feat today. But in the short history of this current championship system, the Chase has proven something of a moving target. Just because it's been won a certain way in one year, that doesn't mean it's going to be won the same way again. Will 2008 be decided by another run like Johnson's last season, when his average finish in the 10 Chase events was fifth? Or will it be decided like Johnson's first title in 2006, when his average finish was 10.8?

"It just depends on the races, and really it's going to depend on the first four to five weeks and how that goes," Johnson said. "In '06 when we won the championship, we were convinced that you had to finish in the top 10 every week in order to win the championship. I left Talladega 180 points out of the lead and thought I was done, and still came back and won, because it was such a weird year and a lot of guys had bad luck. Last year, you look at the average it took to win, it was [5.0] to win the championship. So you just don't know until you get into it."

An examination of past Chases offers few clues to a winning formula. In the inaugural Chase in 2004, eventual champion Kurt Busch won the opener at New Hampshire, survived a blown engine and a 42nd-place finish at Atlanta, and took the title by eight points over Johnson. His average finish was 8.9, slightly higher than the 8.7 Stewart recorded en route to the 2005 championship, which he won despite not winning a single race after the Chase began. While Johnson's back-to-back titles were each born of iffy starts and overwhelming finishes, those four victories last year set a new standard. Of course, they were also necessary, given how runner-up Jeff Gordon pushed him through the entire year.

"It's just math, you know?" Edwards said. "You just have to have the best average. The way Jimmie and Kyle and everyone is running, you might have to win to beat them. There are going to be days where you'll definitely have to win to beat them. For me, we're just going to keep racing like we have been the last month. I don't believe anybody's scored more points than us. It's real close. We're going to do that." (Continued)