From one extreme to the other, the Sprint Cup Series moves from 2.66-mile Talladega Superspeedway to the .75-mile short track at Richmond this weekend.

Back in the day, Richard Petty owned Richmond. From 1967-75, The King won 12 times in 18 starts, including seven consecutive from Sept. 13, 1970, to Sept. 9, 1973.

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Today, while Jimmie Johnson has won three of the past four races at RIR, and notables Tony Stewart, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kevin Harvick also run well here, it's two up-and-comers who are looking to breakthrough at the track -- Kyle Busch and Denny Hamlin.

Joe Gibbs Racing's dynamic duo leads the field in best average finish at Richmond (but neither has been to Victory Lane), and both are battling for position in the top five in the driver standings (fifth-place Hamlin leads Busch by 66 points).

Hamlin, a native of Chesterfield, Va., was in position to sweep the spring races at RIR last year but a late pit stop relegated him to a 24th-place finish, three laps off the pace of winner Clint Bowyer.

Busch finished second in the 2008 spring race -- his third runner-up finish among six top-fives in eight starts at the track.

"At Richmond, you try to be easy on the brakes getting in, so you don't lock up getting into the corner or get too loose getting into the corner," Busch said. "It's really particular. The center [of the corner] always seems to be a little tight with these [new] cars. And the exit, today, has been so loose. Nobody has any forward bite coming up off the corner, so it's pretty bad. That should make for a pretty interesting race.

"It's a fun short track. It's pretty fast and it usually spreads out, and you'll get a lot of grooves to choose from. You can pretty much count on the usual exciting short-track racing when you go there."

Since his Richmond debut on May 14, 2005, Busch (1,236 points) trails only Harvick (1,249) and Stewart (1,237) in racking up points at the track. But he's still learning and adjusting and relying on crew chief Steve Addington.

"I think Steve understands how passionate I am and how eager I am to run well and be successful," Busch said. "He's the same way but appears to everyone else as laid-back and doesn't always show it. If I'm the one upset about something, he's the one who understands my frustrations and he'll just keep working on making things better, instead of just getting frustrated with me.

"It's easy for me to get frustrated behind the wheel, driving these things. But for him to be on my side and understand what I'm feeling and what I need in the racecar has just made it an easy transition for me. He just always seems to be a calming influence, no matter the situation we're in."

Hamlin has taken to Richmond like a baby to a pacifier; he has three top-five finishes and has never started worse than 11th in six races. He finished second in his first race at the track on May 6, 2006 -- but it's last year's tire problem that he cannot shake.

"It definitely replays in your mind for sure," Hamlin admitted. "There's obviously nothing we could've done. It wasn't like I second-guessed something that I did and I could've changed something to prevent us from not winning that race. It's just one of those things that bad luck strikes.

"The good part is knowing that we're going back to the same track hopefully with the same weather conditions and we'll have a car that is just as strong. We're going to go back on the same setup and if it isn't as strong we're going to fine tune it."

And while the Nos. 11 and 18 are from the same stable, both drivers' styles come into play during set-up.

"It's the Cup side that I've had some issues with on the flat tracks," Busch said. "The Nationwide side of it, we are fine. Richmond hasn't given us as much trouble, since it's banked a bit more than Phoenix or New Hampshire. In the past, with Hendrick, I was fine on the flat stuff, too. But, for some reason, it's just with these Gibbs cars I don't have the feel for it. I'm not sure why or what it is.

"We kind of came here with my own set-up this time around and it seems to be paying off a little bit for us rather than trying a Denny set-up. Denny always runs well on the flat tracks, but his driving style is so much different than mine, I can't run the same. Denny ran really well at Richmond last year, so I'm hoping we have a car that is as good as his. We tried something different at Phoenix that seemed to fit my driving style better, so hopefully it helps me more at Richmond this weekend and at other places that we struggled at last year."

And while Hamlin dominated this race a year ago -- he led 381 laps -- he knows how close he was to winning. "You can't describe the emotion. It's just one of those points in a driver's career where he says that, 'This is the race that this track owes me,' " he said.

"This is the point where I say that this race track owes me and that was the one for Richmond."