At the beginning of this Chase thing in September everyone said that the Championship was going to belong to Kyle Busch and his Joe Gibbs Racing team and look at Kyle now, he is sitting 445 points behind current leader Johnson and is in last place in the Chase standings.

Why?

Essentially two very bad races at the start of the Chase cost Busch his shot at the title, and like I said, there are four races left where anything can happen at anytime to anyone – including Johnson.

The title isn’t Jimmie’s yet, but it is certainly his to give away right now. One or two bad runs could almost certainly rob him of his record tying third straight Championship.

This weekend the ‘Cupsters’ are racing at Atlanta Motor Speedway and if I’m not mistaken it is one of the fastest, if not the fastest, non-restrictor plate tracks out there. If a team has a car set up just right they will be able to get close to 200 mph at the end of the straight-aways going into the corners.

If a team can’t get a car to turn, especially in the corners, then they will have a very long day at the track.

Speaking of the track, Atlanta is a 1.5 quad-oval with 24 degrees of banking in the corners and the racing surface itself is about 10 years old which offers less traction for the drivers than a newer track surface would.

When they raced at Atlanta back in March there was a bit of a tire controversy where the right side tires were wearing out way too fast which made the cars drive poorly in the corners – sounds like a familiar reoccurring theme here doesn’t it.?

Goodyear has done some tire testing in the past few weeks and they have decided to bring a different right side tire with them to the race so that the teams will have better control of their cars in the corners which will allow them to carry greater speed out of the corners onto the straight-aways.

But according to Kyle Busch in an interview at scenedaily.com these new tires will only last about 8 or so laps longer than the tire used in the spring race and then you will end up with an ill handling car and that means bad news for some teams as Atlanta has a history of long green flag runs.

After last week’s dominating performance by the Hendrick racing stable (4 out of the top 6 finishers were Hendrick owned cars) look for another strong performance from them (5, 24, 48, 88) again this week. The other team to look out for is Roush/Fenway. The Roush/Fenway cars are strong at Atlanta too, especially Carl Edwards (99).

The dark horse to watch out for this week would be the No. 43 Dodge driven by Bobby Labonte. Labonte has a good history at this track and if he has a good car under him he will be a contender at the end of the race.