Mark Martin, driver of the Hendrick Motorsports No. 5 Chevrolet, won the LifeLock.Com 400 at ChicagoLand Speedway in Joliet, Ill., on Saturday evening. The win was Martin’s fourth this season, which leads all NASCAR Sprint Cup drivers in the 2009 campaign.
The Race for the Chase standings experienced a major shakeup with 11 of the top-17 drivers shifting their position. Tony Stewart, with a fourth-place finish and Jeff Gordon, runner-up in Saturday night’s contest, maintained their top-two positions. Jimmie Johnson, with an eighth-place finish and Kurt Busch, coming in 17th, stay in the third and fourth Chase positions but continue to grow less congenial with each passing race. Denny Hamlin continued his resurgence with a top-five and traded places with Carl Edwards, who finished 14th and currently sits sixth in the standings. With a top-10 finish, Ryan Newman maintained his seventh-place status and a 134-point Chase cushion.
The final five positions have a less than comfortable lead of 51 points (or less) with which to work over the final seven Chase qualifying races. Kasey Kahne, with his third top-10 finish in the past four races, jumped from 12th to eighth place and Juan Pablo Montoya, with his sixth consecutive top-12 finish, has moved from 11th to ninth. An ill-handling, problematic M&M’s Toyota brought Kyle Busch to the flag in 33rd place Saturday evening. The points leader entering the 2008 chase has now fallen to 10th in the standings with a mere 13-point cushion keeping him Chase eligible.
Mark Martin and Rick Hendrick both celebrated Saturday night as the eldest Hendrick Motorsports driver brought another victory to the organization’s win total and escalated him from 13th to 11th in the points. Martin becomes the third HMS driver now in the top 12. Matt Kenseth, with a 23rd-place finish, drops from 10th to 12th in the standings. Martin and Kenseth, while currently Chase eligible, are working with a bare minimum 11 and 10 point cushion, respectively, over 13th place. Martin, with a series-best four wins, would lead the chase with 40 bonus points as the standings now exist. But, the bonus points will not factor if Martin fails to make the chase.
Greg Biffle, with an uncharacteristic fourth consecutive finish outside of the top 25, has dropped from ninth to 13th, but remains only 10 points behind his 12th-place teammate. David Reutimann continues an up-and-down season, bringing the Aaron’s Dream Machine Toyota home in 12th place and continues to maintain his 14th-place positon in the standings.
Clint Bowyer and Brian Vickers each moved up one position in the point’s standings, with Bowyer up to 15th after his ninth-place finish Saturday evening while Vickers, with a second consecutive top-10 finish now stands 16th.
With an approximate 160-point swing from first to last each race, those drivers in point’s positions 13 through 16 remain within reach of the top 12. But, as the remaining Race for the Chase events wind down, those on the outside looking in will not only need top-10 finishes but will also look for those currently in the latter half of the top 12 to have problems down the stretch.
The top 12 is quickly becoming a moving target. The roster shows a net change of five drivers over the previous season’s chase. Of those five new drivers currently in the top 12, three are in by margins of 11 to 51 points, by no means a comfortable margin. One former chase driver, Greg Biffle, is currently out but only by a margin of 10 points. Down the stretch there exists the possibility of six new faces within the 2009 chase. It only gets better.
