Kevin Harvick on the pole as rain cancels qualifying at Chicagoland

The green flag for the myAFibRisk.com 400 is set for 3:16 pm. He tends to elevate his elite skill to an even higher level during NASCAR’s playoffs though, as he leads all drivers with 25 total Chase wins. Drivers who made the Chase would then be placed at a points interval that consisted of the leader receiving 5,050 points and would have five point increment drops from positions second through 10th. It says a lot to have one sponsor and one team for this amount of time.

How will Jimmie Johnson, the No. 1 seed, do in the Chase? Tony Stewart has the most wins at Chicagoland, three.

What a difference a year makes.

Over the years, Chevy has won 738 races to lead second-place victor Ford by 106 total victories. “Hopefully, they can beat themselves”, reigning series champion Kevin Harvick said Thursday at Chase Media Day at The Murphy in downtown Chicago.

Keselowski is ninth in the standings, 9 points out of first. Quietly, he has the longest streak of top-10 finishes entering the Chase (9). Included in Keselowski’s streak are three runner-up finishes.

Martin Truex Jr. has had a tremendous season and started strong as he finally was able to improve of a slew of top five finishes to grab a victory at Pocono in June.

Among the drivers who got the raw end of the process were Denny Hamlin and Clint Bowyer. Harvick was the only driver to top 188 miles per hour during the first practice session held at the track. He’s been inside the top 10 only four times in the last 10 races, and led laps in only two of the races in that stretch. Logano was on the pole and finished third at Richmond. “He better not be celebrating”, Kenseth said of his crew chief Jason Ratcliff after winning the race last weekend in Richmond.

He should probably head down to Huntersville, North Carolina and blare out the tune at the Joe Gibbs Racing shop.

JGR has won eight of the past 11 races. The victories – coming from Kenseth, Kyle Busch and Carl Edwards – have come on a variety of track configurations and lengths. But that’s a dream. “I think we are behind as the No. 24 team”. “In Chicago, before you go, ‘OK I’d like to get this race off to a good start”.

“We haven’t been in race trim yet, we stayed in qualifying trim all day and I felt like it was qualifying during practice”, Logano said via SB Nation. “All those cars are capable of winning a championship, period”. It begins September 20 at Chicagoland Speedway followed by New Hampshire Motor Speedway and Dover global Speedway in the following weeks. At Bristol in April, his 4wd was also included in an accident. He, along with others lower on the grid, used consistency to sneak in to the 2015 Chase.

“For us, we’ve been top 10 in points all year, so I feel that, if we can go out and do what we’ve been doing, that’s a realistic goal”. That will likely boil down to his Hendrick Motorsport team, which has been struggling.

When I wrote this column about 15 years ago in one of these papers, I made weekly race predictions. Logano had a chance to win it all previous year in Homestead and came in 16th; was it too big a stage? Newman last won a race in July 2013, and it’s hard to see him surviving three cuts without ending the drought. Prior to the 2008 season Nextel merged with Sprint and the series became known as the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series.

Why he’ll win: Nobody in the Chase field is as more accustomed to picking up steam at this part of the year than Johnson.

There are also first-time Chasers Jamie McMurray and Paul Menard. Winners of any of the three races automatically advances to the next round.

But Truex and FRR had a disastrous 2014 season, and his year off the track was affected by his girlfriend Sherry Pollex’s brush with cancer.