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By JIM McCONNELL
RICHMOND--When Kasey Kahne won the Nextel Cup race at Michigan International Speedway in June, it was his fourth victory in a span of 12 races. He looked like a lock to qualify for the season-ending Chase.
Despite several mediocre performances, Kahne still held down sixth in the points standings as recently as a month ago.
Since then, however, the third-year Cup driver has seen the wheels fall completely off his No. 9 Dodge team's bid for a series championship.
After finishing 31st at Pocono, Kahne squandered a pair of top-10s by crashing on the last lap in consecutive weeks at Indianapolis and Watkins Glen.
As the series returns to Michigan's 2-mile oval, Kahne finds himself 11th in Cup points, 54 behind Dale Earnhardt Jr., with four races left in the regular season.
He's outside the Chase looking in, and he doesn't like the view.
"It's gonna be close. That's just the way it is," Kahne said Wednesday morning during a promotional appearance at Richmond International Raceway. "We need to start winning races."
Kahne knows a little something about taking the checkered flag. His four wins this season are matched only by series points leader Jimmie Johnson.
But all of Kahne's success came early in the season. In the seven races since his victory at Michigan, Kahne's average finish is 25th. He's placed inside the top 20 only once, at New Hampshire.
Kahne was quick to acknowledge that his team has misplaced the magic touch it seemed to possess just a few months ago.
"I felt like we were qualifying good, were good in practice, but when we got with a bunch of race cars, we were out to lunch," he said.
Still, it took a major dose of bad luck and an ill-timed operator error to knock Kahne out of the top 10.
Two weeks ago, Kahne began the final lap of the Allstate 400 in ninth place, with an eye on passing Tony Stewart for eighth. Instead, Kahne smacked the wall after a three-car dogfight with Stewart and Carl Edwards; with all but a few cars still on the lead lap, Kahne was left with a disappointing 36th-place finish.
"I was trying to pass Tony for five or six laps and I finally got a run on him. When I did we opened up the air for Carl Edwards to get a run on us. He wanted to make it three-wide getting into turn 3. I blocked him from doing that and we all entered turn 3 on top of each other and I ended up crashing," Kahne said.
"The way I could've not had that happen was to not try to pass Tony and settle for ninth place. Looking back, yeah, I would've done that if had known I was going to destroy my car and be sore as hell for 21/2 weeks. But that's not what you do as a race car driver."
Asked if he might've been driving too aggressively for the situation, Kahne flatly rejected the suggestion.
"If you catch a driver and you're passing him, what's wrong with passing a car? People pass cars all day long," Kahne added. "Carl Edwards tried to make it three-wide on the last lap; if you're going to say someone was racing too hard, that's racing too hard. I just took the worst of it."
Watkins Glen was a different story. Again running ninth on the final lap, Kahne drove off the winding road course and finished 22nd.
"I don't know what I was thinking. I just screwed up," he said.
The two late wrecks cost Kahne 124 points and five places in the Nextel Cup standings. But car owner Ray Evernham, who joked earlier this week that he's had to hide all sharp objects from crew chief Kenny Francis, said it's no time for the No. 9 team to start panicking.
"We're bringing top-10 cars every week. What we've got to do collectively as a group is make sure we don't have failures and make sure as Kasey matures that we understand sometimes we've just got to take the position given to us. I'm confident with the tracks coming up that we will continue to bring top 10, top five cars. If we don't make mistakes we've got a great shot to get back in the Chase," Evernham added.
Should Kahne fail to make it back into the top 10, he would stand as further living proof of the value NASCAR places on consistency.
Jeff Burton and Mark Martin are both in good shape to qualify for the Chase despite being winless this season, just as Martin, Rusty Wallace and Ryan Newman did in 2005.
Jeff Gordon, meanwhile, won four times last season and still missed the Chase.
But if Kahne is concerned about winding up with a similar fate, he's not showing it.
"I've been more worried about our race team and our organization, things like that," he said. "I haven't really felt the pressure of making the Chase yet. I think that will come as it winds down and gets closer to it."
There's not much time to waste.
To reach JIM McCONNELL:
Email: jmcconnell@freelancestar.com
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