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CUP: Keselowski Facing Huge Challenge
Brad Keselowski will roll off 32nd at Martinsville on Sunday…
Tom Jensen  |  Posted October 27, 2012   Martinsville, VA
Brad Keselowski won a championship in only his third full Sprint Cup season. (Photo: Getty Images)
How fast can the NASCAR Sprint Cup championship picture change?

Try 0.331 seconds.

That’s the difference between Jimmie Johnson’s qualifying lap of 19.402 seconds yesterday at Martinsville Speedway and points leader Brad Keselowski’s lap of 19.733 seconds.

Johnson’s time earned him the pole; Keselowski’s put the Penske Racing driver 32nd on the starting grid for Sunday’s Tums Fast Relief 500.

Keselowski has led the Chase for the Sprint Cup after five of the first six races and enters Sunday’s race with a lead of 7 points over Johnson and 20 over Denny Hamlin.

With only two finishes outside the top 15 in his last 25 races, Keselowski has been remarkably consistent this season, with no obvious weak spots in his game anymore, which is why Johnson and Hamlin have unable to catch him so far.

But starting 32nd at Martinsville puts Keselowski in what could be a deep hole, given that he’ll have terrible track position and a bad pit stall at a place where track position and pit selection are everything.

“I would much rather race towards the front than qualify towards the front if I had to pick between the two,” said Keselowski. “And I feel … confident we’ll be capable off pulling that off once the race gets started, so just ready to keep going.”

So far in the Chase, poor qualifying hasn’t hurt Keselowski.

In the first six Chase races, his average starting spot was 17.5, and he won at Chicagoland after qualifying 13th and again from the 10th starting spot at Dover.

But Martinsville is an entirely different animal, congested and claustrophobic both on the track and on pit road, a place where carnage reigns in the back of the pack. Keselowski will have a huge challenge making up track position here. He likely won’t be able to use fuel mileage and tire strategy to get to the front as he has done on some of the faster tracks this year.

And without question, the heat is intensifying for Keselowski.

“I think with every week, the pressure will build,” said Denny Hamlin, a four-time Martinsville winner who will start fifth on Sunday. “You can put that iron-clad armor around you, and think that it's not going to affect you, but it will eventually. … It just continues to build and get harder to block out everything that you hear. You are thinking about all of your dreams coming true in just a matter of weeks. That definitely will affect you. It's just how you let it affect you, whether it be a positive or negative."

Four-time series champion Jeff Gordon agreed that the spotlight is on Keselowski now.

“This is not his best track,” Gordon said of Keselowski. “It’s a track that he is up against two guys (Johnson and Hamlin) that are very good here. So that puts a little bit more pressure on him. He’s leading the points and been doing a great job. I think this will be a real test for Brad. I feel like he handles pressure well. … This is a big test of how they survive this weekend.”

Johnson, obviously, was very happy about where he’s starting and the potential advantage it gives him over Keselowski.

“We’ve helped ourselves out dramatically today by qualifying on the pole, we’ve got the safest pit stall, and starting with track position is very important,” Johnson said Friday. “So, stats show one thing, but you’ve still got to go run the race and I feel really good about my Lowe’s Chevrolet and I think we’ll be in strong, championship-form leaving here.”

Then again, should Keselowski finish Sunday’s race with his points lead intact, he will be in tremendous shape to win his first championship. So far, he’s dodged every obstacle in his way and done a tremendous job.

One driver who believes in Keselowski is his former boss in the NASCAR Nationwide Series, Dale Earnhardt Jr.

“I don’t think he’s going to crack,” Earnhardt said. “I think he’s going to be hard to beat. I think he will be a tough competitor all the way through. Brad has been waiting on this opportunity all his life so I don’t expect him to crack under the pressure. I think he will be tough.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100.
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