CUP: Now Or Never For Kahne

Sprint Cup

CUP: Now Or Never For Kahne

Kasey Kahne will start 15th on Sunday…

Tom Jensen | Posted October 27, 2012 Martinsville, VA

Kasey Kahne is fifth in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series points standings. (Photo: Getty Images)

By his own admission, Kasey Kahne’s odds of winning the Chase for the Sprint Cup this year aren’t good. But they aren’t impossible, either.

In his first year with the powerhouse Hendrick Motorsports team, Kahne is fifth in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series points standings, 30 back of Brad Keselowski with just four races left in the season.

If Kahne is to mount a serious title challenge this season, it needs to start in Sunday’s Tums Fast Relief 500 at the tiny 0.526-mile Martinsville Speedway. There, Kahne will start 15th in the race, while a miserable qualifying effort for Keselowski left the points leader 32nd on the grid.

Unfortunately for Kahne, teammate Jimmie Johnson, who is second in points, qualified on the pole, while third-place points man Denny Hamlin will start fifth.

Johnson also has six Martinsville victories and Hamlin has four, while Kahne has no victories and just one top-five finish in 21 prior starts at the Virginia short track.

Still, Kahne has made remarkable progress this season, especially since the first time the series visited Martinsville, when a rare engine failure left him 38th in the race and 31st in points.

Fifth looks a whole lot better than that right now, especially since a big race on Sunday could move Kahne higher in the points.

“I still think we are in it, and still think we have a shot,” Kahne said Friday at Martinsville. “We are still running strong and have made up a couple points the last couple weeks, not many, but we have made up a little bit.”

And with 500 laps of boys having at it on Sunday, the final race results could well shake up the points standings.

“Anything can happen at Martinsville and hopefully we can put together a good race Sunday and gain a few more points and just keep doing that till the end,” said Kahne. “And I don’t know if that will be enough, because the guys we are racing against are pretty darn good. So it’s going to be tough to beat them but we are going to try.”

Last year, when he drove for Red Bull and wasn’t in the Chase, Kahne earned the third-highest number of points over the final 10 races. And although he is fifth in points now, he is once again third in Chase points through six races, trailing only Keselowski and Johnson. Kahne’s average Chase finish is 7.83, again behind only the two points leaders.

All of which is one of those glass-half-full/glass-half-empty deals for Kahne.

Kahne is having the best season of his Sprint Cup career in terms of points, but wants much more.

“It feels good, but I wish I was closer,” Kahne said. “You know, I wish we hadn’t given up some of the points that we have, but we have also had a pretty decent Chase and we have some really good tracks to go, so I like being in that top five and kind of in that mix. You know, we are on the outside but we definitely still have a shot.”

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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Tom Jensen

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