Stewart Misses the Chase

One of the possible scenerios for Saturday night's final Nextel Cup race before the beginning of the "Chase to the Championship" was the possibility that reigning Nextel Cup champ Tony Stewart could fall to 10th and miss this year's opportunity to win the title. I talked about that here in my prerace post.

Sho 'nuff, that's what happened. After wrecking his primary car in practice, Tony had to go to a backup and after a sub-par evening in Richmond, ended up 11th in points and out of the chase:

In a performance not befitting of a champion, Stewart eliminated himself from title contention with a miserable showing Saturday night at Richmond International Raceway. He wrecked his primary car minutes into the first practice, then limped to an 18th-place finish in his backup.

It plummeted Stewart from eighth to 11th in the series standings, and he won't be eligible to race for the Nextel Cup title when the postseason begins next week.

"I thought for sure he was going to be the guy to beat for the championship," said Matt Kenseth, who will start the Chase as the points leader. "When you think of Tony, you think of him winning championships and being in there."

Stewart can now finish no higher than 11th in the final standings, guaranteeing him the worst finish of his career. Stewart's previous low was sixth, in 2000 and again in 2004, the first year of the Chase.

"It takes 26 weeks to get to this point," Stewart sighed after climbing out of his backup No. 20 Chevrolet. "This is proof of how tough this series is and how tough it is just to make this Chase.

This is going to make the last 10 races tough on the rest of the field because I predict that Tony will be on a tear to win every race. He won't have much reason to save his equipment or be careful around other drivers. He'd still like to finish 11th, because there's a big bonus for doing that, but I'm not sure how much that's really going to matter to him.

Congratulations to Mark Martin and Kasey Kahne, who started the race in 10th & 11th spots. Those guys and their teams got the job done and made the Chase. Martin moved all the way up to 6th, and Kahne got into 10th, only 16 points ahead of Stewart.

An interesting side note to this year's chase - only one car made it into the final 10 that came from a team that fielded less than two full-time cars, and that was Dale Earnhardt Jr. DEI has two full time cars (Dale Jr. and Martin Truax), and one part-timer (Paul Menard) who had only 4 starts this year. Every other team in the chase has at least three full time cars.

Roger Penske Racing and Robert Yates racing were shut out, and they both field two full-time cars. None of the single car teams had a chance. The future for Nextel cup is clearly multi-car efforts, with at least 3 full-timers.