The 12 contenders in this year’s chase for NASCAR’s Sprint Cup were finalised in Saturday night’s 400-mile race on the one-mile Richmond oval. The ‘Chase for the Cup’ takes place over the last 10 races of NASCAR’s marathon 36-race season, starting next weekend on the high-banked 1.5-mile Chicagoland oval.

The Richmond race was won by Kevin Harvick, who scored his fourth win of the year in one of Richard Childress’s trio of Chevrolets. Harvick was chased home by Carl Edwards aboard his Roush-Fenway Ford, with Jeff Gordon taking third place in his Hendrick Chevrolet. Championship leader Kyle Busch finished sixth in one of Joe Gibbs’ Toyotas, so Busch and Harvick go into the Chase as top seeds, both with four wins.

Although Busch and Harvick have won NASCAR’s second-division Nationwide championship, neither have claimed a Sprint Cup title. Busch, 26, is considered NASCAR’s fastest driver and is this year’s championship favourite. He’s been racing Cup cars for eight years and this is his fourth season with Joe Gibbs’ team. Harvick, 36, is in his eleventh year in the Cup series, all with Childress, after replacing Dale Earnhardt following his death at Daytona in 2001.

The 12 championship contenders are seeded based on wins. All start the 10-race Chase with 5000 points, plus an additional 10 points for each win scored in the first 26 races of the season. Busch and Edwards thus go to Chicago next weekend with 5040 points, followed by four-time champion Jeff Gordon on 5030 points.

Seeded fourth is 2003 Cup champion Matt Kenseth, who’s won two races so far this season in one of four Roush-Fenway Fords. Kenseth’s team-mate Carl Edwards is next up with one win and is grouped with defending champion Jimmie Johnson (Hendrick Chevrolet), Kurt Busch (Penske Dodge) and Ryan Newman (Stewart-Haas Chevrolet).

Completing the top 10 are Tony Stewart (Stewart-Haas Chevrolet) and Dale Earnhardt Jr (Hendrick Chevrolet). Neither Stewart nor Earnhardt have won during this year’s first 26 races. Brad Keselowski and Denny Hamlin round out the 12 Chase contenders. Keselowski has shown plenty of ability, winning three races in his second full Cup season with Roger Penske’s Dodge team. Hamlin has scored one victory this year aboard his Joe Gibbs Toyota.

This is the eighth year for the Chase for the Cup and, contrived or not, the system does help keep the championship open down to the last race in November at the Homestead-Miami Speedway. In theory any of the 12 seeded drivers has a chance to take the title. Busch and Harvick start the Chase as favourites but each of four-time champion Gordon, five-time champion Johnson and Edwards are entirely capable of challenging for this year’s title, as is Keselowski.

The rest are long shots but NASCAR’s great depth of field means anything is possible. Like it or not, it’s motor racing’s toughest championship.

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NASCAR couldn’t have asked for a better championship battle, the closest in its history, with all three contenders in the running until the final laps. No matter what you may think about NASCAR, and as much as big-time American stock car racing is struggling with declining crowds and TV ratings, you can’t deny that it puts on a good show – probably the best in racing.

Jimmie Johnson, Denny Hamlin and Kevin Harvick all ran into trouble at some point in the season finale at the Homestead-Miami Speedway. All three looked likely champions at different stages of the race, but Johnson came through to take a record fifth consecutive Sprint Cup, narrowly defeating Hamlin and Harvick after a marathon season of 36 races over 10 months. Carl Edwards won at Homestead-Miami with Johnson finishing second, Harvick third and Hamlin 14th after a series of adventures.

Johnson is an excellent driver, a true racer and a good guy, and his fifth straight championship is a tremendous accomplishment. Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt are NASCAR’s greatest champions both with seven titles, but neither won five in a row. Statistically, in terms of starts versus championships, Johnson is well ahead of Petty and Earnhardt. At 35, he has raced Sprint Cup cars for 10 years, all with Rick Hendrick’s team, and he probably has at least another five or more strong seasons within his reach.

“I can’t believe it,” he grinned. “Four was amazing. Now I’ve got to figure out what to say about what it means to win five of these things. It’s pretty damn awesome, I can tell you that. Sometimes we weren’t the fastest this year, but we had the most heart and I think I enjoyed this season more than any of the others.”

Johnson’s fifth title is also the 10th – and a record – for Rick Hendrick’s four-car Chevrolet team. Hendrick started his team in 1984 and won his previous championships with Jeff Gordon (1995, ’97-98 and 2001) and Terry Labonte (in 1996).

Championship runner-up Hamlin drives for Joe Gibbs’s three-car Toyota team. The 30-year-old has been racing Cup cars for five years, all with Gibbs’s team. He won eight races this year, more than anyone else, and overshadowed his more hyped team-mate Kyle Busch. “We had a great year,” said Hamlin. “We won more races than we’ve ever won, and it was only circumstances that took us out.”

Hamlin believes Johnson and Hendrick’s team weren’t quite as powerful as in recent years: “I don’t think they showed the strength this year that they have in the past. That opened up the door to teams like us, and a few others, to win a lot of races. We really stepped up our programme the last couple of years. It’s a good feeling to go to the track knowing you can win on any given week.

“My job is to work in the off-season to do everything I can better. I know every year I’m going to be better than I was the previous year. So we’re going to take this team and keep working and go get ‘em next year.”

Harvick is equally confident of his chances of beating Johnson next year. “We went down swinging,” he said. “We came here to go as fast as we could and try to win. We did everything we wanted to do today except win the race, so this is a great spot to start building for a consistent championship next year.”

There’s now a brief breather, a few weeks off for the teams, and then it’s back to it to prepare for Daytona next February. The hope is the grandstands will be full and the TV ratings will at least level out.

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It’s easy to poke fun at NASCAR’s ‘Chase for the Cup’ but the championship play-off among the year’s top 12 drivers – run over the final 10 of 36 races – can certainly shake up the status quo. The point was made in last weekend’s opening round of the Chase at the one-mile New Hampshire Motor Speedway, where Clint Bowyer led most of the race and came through to win after leader Tony Stewart ran out of fuel. Bowyer was the 12th and final qualifier for this year’s Chase, but his New Hampshire win vaulted him to second in the points behind Denny Hamlin.

Bowyer was the man to beat on Sunday, leading 177 of 300 laps, only to be stuck in second place behind Stewart towards the end as both drivers struggled to save fuel. But Stewart’s engine stuttered and died on the penultimate lap allowing Bowyer to sweep through and score his first Sprint Cup victory in 88 starts going back to the spring of 2008. Bowyer, 31, drives for Richard Childress’s three-car Chevrolet team, for whom he has raced since joining NASCAR’s top league in 2005. A dark horse going into the Chase, Bowyer has suddenly emerged as a championship contender.

Bowyer, from Kansas in the heart of America’s vast Midwest, won NASCAR’s second-division Nationwide championship in 2008. His best season to date came in ’07 when he finished third in the points, while Childress’s team has not won the Sprint Cup since Dale Earnhardt took the last of his seven titles with RCR back in 1994. NASCAR legend Earnhardt won six of his seven championships with Childress’s team.

Denny Hamlin, winner of a series high six races this year, finished a strong second in New Hampshire and leads the championship by 35 points from Bowyer. Third in the championship at this stage is Kevin Harvick, who was fifth in New Hampshire in another Childress Chevrolet. Defending NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson had a bad race, finishing two laps down in 25th place after damaging his car in a mid-race multi-car collision.

Meanwhile, Dario Franchitti continued to chisel into Will Power’s IndyCar points lead as he beat Power at the 1.5-mile Twin Ring Motegi oval in Japan. Hélio Castoneves, who qualified on pole, led most of the race to score his third win of the season and the ninth this year for Team Penske. Championship leader Power came through to finish third for his best oval track result of the year after running fourth or fifth for most of the race.

Franchitti drove a strong race in Japan, moving up from fourth on the grid to finish second and close the gap to Penske driver Power to just 12 points with one race remaining. The IndyCar season comes to a close with a Saturday night race on the 1.5-mile Homestead-Miami oval on October 2, with everything to play for between Power and Franchitti.

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Kevin Harvick scored a textbook win in Sunday’s NASCAR Sprint Cup race on the giant Talledega superspeedway in Alabama. Over the closing laps he kept his nose within inches of Daytona 500 winner Jamie McMurray’s tail and pulled out to pass in the final quarter-mile. Harvick got McMurray’s car loose as he made the move and, during the resulting wobble, he eased by to win by about two feet, or 0.012 seconds. The move was perfectly timed, allowing Kevin to break a 116-race winless streak.

Harvick’s last victory was at the 2007 Daytona 500, while team owner Richard Childress last celebrated a win at Talladega in 2000 with the late, great Dale Earnhardt. Harvick replaced Earnhardt at Richard Childress Racing (RCR) after Dale Sr was killed at Daytona in ’01, and he’s been the team leader since then. It was announced last week that Harvick’s sponsors, Shell and Pennzoil, are leaving RCR at the end of the year to move to Roger Penske’s NASCAR team, so last weekend’s win was particularly sweet.

“Everything played out perfectly for us today,” said Harvick. “We had a plan to ride in the back, wait for 50 laps and really push forward after that. It’s great to see a finish like that – and we broke [our winning] drought too.”

McMurray said of Harvick’s eleventh-hour pass: “I thought I was low enough that he couldn’t get underneath me. So I was guarding the outside and when he pulled to the left it pulled my car around. As soon as I realised he’d got underneath I was worried about side-drafting him to the line. You live for those moments. It was a great race. We’re just proud to finish second today.”

McMurray’s Earnhardt-Ganassi team-mate Juan Pablo Montoya battled for the lead near the end of the race but wound up third. Championship leader Jimmie Johnson crashed in the closing laps and was classified 31st, but retained his title lead by 29 points from Harvick. For the second race in a row Johnson was involved in a fender-bashing incident with team-mate Jeff Gordon. Late in the race Johnson moved down to block Gordon as the latter tried to steam past. Both cars lost momentum and fell back, triggering a multi-car accident.

“I got a huge push down the back straightaway and I was 10mph faster than anybody,” said Gordon. “The number 48 is testing my patience, I can tell you. It takes a lot to make me mad and I am p***** right now. I don’t know what it is between me and him.”

This was the first race run on a superspeedway in two years with a traditional NASCAR-style spoiler rather than the rear wing originally adopted for the ‘Car of Tomorrow’. The race featured a record 88 lead changes among no fewer than 29 drivers, prompting Gordon to say: “I thought it was a heck of a race. There were times when it got a little wild, but I don’t think you could ask for a better race. So I applaud the [decision to introduce the traditional-style] rear spoiler.”

In NASCAR, keeping it simple and a little antique is always the best solution.

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