The NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Chase for the Championship begins today as the top 12 drivers as well as the rest of the field take their cars to New Hampshire for the Sylvania 300.

If you look at history, the winner of this year’s Championship is going to be Jimmie Johnson but if you look at this season, Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch are favored.  Tony Stewart is the last driver before Johnson’s series of Championship Cup wins to have won the Cup.  While Stewart hasn’t been performing the best throughout the year, he has been picking up as of late and looking back at the past couple years, he always seems to get his momentum in the second half of the season toward the end.  This will be perfect timing for Smoke if he can maintain his momentum as he may very well be able to capture this year’s Championship.

All 12 of the drivers that made the Chase are true contenders for this year’s Chase.  This is probably one of the toughest fields that NASCAR has seen in quite some time with many of the top named drivers in the Chase like Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart, Kyle and Kurt Busch, among several others.

A few of the drivers are starting the Chase off right by qualifying in the top 10 for Sunday’s Sylvania 300; however, as we have all seen from the past, qualifying order doesn’t always matter.  Despite that, though, here is the top 10 to roll off on the track (you’ll see in parenthesis if the driver is a Chase contender with their point standing position heading into the race):

1.       Brad Keslowski No. 12

2.       Clint Bowyer No. 33 (12th position for Chase – 60 points behind leader)

3.       Tony Stewart No. 14 (6th position for Chase – 50 points behind leader)

4.       Jamie McMurray No. 1

5.       Juan Pablo Montoya No. 42

6.       A.J. Allmendinger No. 43

7.       David Reutimann No. 00

8.       Paul Menard No. 98

9.       Kyle Busch No. 18 ( 4th position for Chase – 30 points behind leader)

10.   Carl Edwards No. 99 ( 9th position for Chase – 60 points behind leader)

Other Chase drivers can be found in starting positions as follows:

Kurt Busch, Jeff Burton, and Greg Biffle will start in 12th, 13th, and 14th positions respectively.  Jeff Gordon will start in 17th with Denny Hamlin and Jimmie Johnson starting in 22nd and 25th.  Kevin Harvick will roll off in 27th while Matt Kenseth will roll off in 33rd.

Who do you think will win this year’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Championship?  I truly believe that every driver has a shot at winning it this year but the drivers will have to have good days – every race.  With such a tight field this year, there is no room for mistakes; no room for bad days.  Every day is going to have to be the best possible.

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