CONCORD, N.C. – It’s Chase time.
And with it, the intensity is about to be kicked up another notch.
“It’s time to crown a champion,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. said. “It’s time to see who’s going to win it. You go run all these races and just sort of go through the motions compared to the Chase. In the Chase, it’s very urgent and just a lot of pressure on everybody.”
Earnhardt and his teammates Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson are part of the 16-driver field in the hunt for a trophy in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup.
All 16 Chase drivers had their points reset to 2,000, with three bonus points added for each regular-season win.
Johnson is at the top of the field with 2,012 points thanks to his four wins. Earnhardt is the sixth seed with his 2,006 points thanks to wins at Talladega and Daytona, and Gordon is in the 13th position with 2,000 points.
The new Chase format introduced in 2014 is still in place this season, adding an extra layer of familiarity for the drivers.
“Everybody was on edge last year just not knowing,” Earnhardt said. “Certainly the rounds and being eliminated brings in some tension that we didn’t have before. So I think that’ll all still be the same, but guys might not be so wound up and so on edge.”
The Challenger Round of the Chase is up first, consisting of races at Chicago, New Hampshire and Dover. After Dover, four drivers will be eliminated as the Chase Grid is trimmed to 12.
"The only thing you can expect is that you’ve got to be on your game."
Jeff Gordon
A win in any of those three races merits an automatic berth in the Contender Round, though consistency is important as well, as the winless drivers that advance will be determined by order of points scored in the three races.
Those rules continue through the three-race Contender Round – Charlotte, Kansas and Talladega – as well as the eight-driver, three-race Eliminator Round – Martinsville, Texas and Phoenix. Then the four drivers remaining for the final race of the season at Homestead-Miami will duel it out with the highest finisher among them crowned the champion.
“I definitely have a better feel for things,” Johnson said of the format. “There’s many ways to be one of the four in Homestead, and I think you have to win Homestead to be the champion. That’s by design. Those first nine, I’ve got a much broader view on how to get things done there.”
But familiarity and comfort are two different things. Gordon said that while drivers understand what is asked of them to become a champion, it doesn’t make the Chase any more predictable.
“Well, the only thing you can expect is that you’ve got to be on your game,” he said. “You’ve got to go out there, be aggressive, get after it. It’s intense, it’s wild, it’s crazy.”
But before it all begins Sunday afternoon at Chicagoland Speedway, the drivers can rest easy that their hard work in the regular season paid off. A whole new season starts now.
“It’s so nice when you get that reset when you’re in it, to kind of take a breath, start over, go attack some racetracks,” Gordon said. “I look at some tracks that are in this final 10 and there are some great tracks for us. So I think that our chances of turning this season into a successful season is very, very attainable.”
At this point in the year, it’s all about stepping up to the challenge.
“You get in that Chase and all of a sudden this guy's ramped it up and this guy over here has ramped it up -- the competition gets so tough because everybody's got their good cars sitting in the back right now waiting on that Chase to start,” Earnhardt explained. “They've got a couple pieces of the puzzle they're not ready to show to the world just yet that'll come out in that Chase. Guys will come out of the woods just flying. So we've got to be ready."