Kasey Kahne stands in the garage during practice for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Shelby American at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. (Photo: Getty Images)
Kasey Kahne is likely to spend much of this Sprint Cup season going around in circles. And not just on the racetrack.
Kahne is in the last year of his contract with Richard Petty Motorsports. Although he has expressed optimism that the refurbished, reorganized team can lift its game, he has made it clear that he is very open to the possibility of moving to another organization for the 2011 season.
The start of this year has complicated that process. Kahne’s No. 9 RPM Fords have been strong in the first two races of the season, but he has little to show for those runs. Crashes in both races put him 33rd in Sprint Cup points entering Sunday’s Shelby American race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
It’s very early in the season, obviously, but Kahne now faces a difficult climb to make the Chase for the Sprint Cup.
“I don’t think our season is over, but we’re definitely in a hole as of today,” Kahne said. “We’re 30-something in points, so that’s not very good, but we still have plenty of racing to go.
“I think we all know that in this sport you can go on rolls, and if you can run consistently you can gain points pretty fast, especially early in the season. If you’re 34th in points after 10 races, you’re probably in trouble, but early in the year I think you have plenty of time to make those gains, and we need to get started this weekend. We have to run well this weekend if we want to get started on going the right direction.”
His worksheet to date contains a 30th-place finish in the Daytona 500 and a 34th-place run last week at Fontana, Calif. The numbers don’t tell the full story, however. Kahne won a qualifying race at Daytona and had a strong outing in the 500 before becoming the innocent victim of a late-race accident. At Fontana, he crashed while racing Juan Pablo Montoya, an incident he blamed on himself.
“I was behind Montoya and I was catching him and getting ready to pass him,” Kahne said. “I had a lot of wheel into it because my car was not turning real well, and then it spun out. I was behind on the wheel because I was turned to the left so far, and the aero was off because I was right behind Montoya, and it was just kind of stupid. I should not have put myself in that position, and I just made a mistake.”
Kahne finds it difficult – at least in public – to evaluate the quality of his equipment. The short version is that his cars have been good, but not as good as he’d like.
