New Hampshire Preview

Can you believe that there are only 10 more races left until the Chase? Sort of like a Chase for the Chase for some of those drivers sitting just outside the top 12 in points like last week’s winner Kasey Kahne who is just 3 points out of 12 th which is currently occupied by Juan Montoya.

The first of these 10 races will be The Lenox Industrial Tools 301 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway this Sunday.

Last week's road race in California was an entertaining one with Kasey Kahne holding off Tony Stewart on 3 re-starts late in the race to get the win. With Kahne's win Richard Petty Motorsports (RPM) made its first trip to victory lane this season and RPM had 3 of its four teams finish in the top 10 too. It looks like the engineers at RPM have the road courses figured out, now they have to take that momentum and carry it into New Hampshire this weekend.

New Hampshire is a fast and flat 1-mile oval where there is only 12 degrees of banking in the corners so look for teams to get creative with their cars by having bigger brake packages similar to what you would see at short tracks or road courses as well as different shock packages on their cars.

Although I would hope that they wouldn’t get too aggressive with their shocks because that would really abuse the front right tire and the last thing you need at New Hampshire is for that tire to go flat when you are in a corner the results could be fatal.

Drivers to look out for here at this track are the usual ones; Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart, Mark Martin and Carl Edwards but I would also keep an eye out Denny Hamlin and Martin Truex Jr who both run well here.

In the "where did he come from?" category I wouldn’t be surprised to see Stewart’s teammate Ryan Newman in the hunt as well as Richard Childress Racing’s Jeff Burton or Kevin Harvick who are both currently in a slump right now but have a history of running well at New Hampshire.

Now that summer is finally here things are starting to heat up and so are things in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, there are only about 400 points between 5th and 20th in points so the real racing is going to happen between these drivers over the next 10 races. ‘The Chase’ for The Chase is about to begin and I can’t wait to see what the next 10 races will bring.