We're only four races into NASCAR's 10-race Chase for the Cup and already half of the dozen drivers in the Chase are long shots to win the championship.
Tony Stewart won the fourth race Sunday at Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway and climbed to seventh from 11th in the standings. Yet he's still a distant 203 points behind leader Jimmie Johnson.
"We could still by theory win the next six races in a row and still not win the point championship," Stewart said after celebrating in Victory Lane.
That's because Johnson and the other drivers ahead of him will be tough to dislodge from the standings unless they have a string of poor finishes, an unlikely scenario.
Even the typical wildness at Talladega didn't change the standings much.
Stewart's Toyota was the top survivor at the high-banked, 2.66-mile track where, to no one's surprise, there were multi-car crashes that collected several Chasers.
They included Carl Edwards, Jeff Gordon, Kevin Harvick, Matt Kenseth, Dale Earnhardt Jr. -- and Greg Biffle, who won the first two Chase races in Loudon, N.H., and Dover, Del.
Yet the top four Chase drivers coming into Talladega are still the top four: Johnson -- who won the third Chase race at Kansas a week earlier -- leads Edwards by 72 points, Biffle by 77 and Jeff Burton by 99.
And for the drivers fifth through 12th, winning the Chase this year looks increasingly remote, even if they're still mathematically alive.
Clint Bowyer is fifth, 152 points behind, followed by Harvick, 171 points back, and then Stewart. All the others are more than 200 points behind.
There still are six races left in the Chase, starting with this Saturday night's race at Lowe's Motor Speedway near Charlotte, N.C., yet already you can already hear the resignation in some of the Chasers' comments.
"We was already kind of a long shot for this thing," Earnhardt said after he fell to 10th in the Chase when his Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet was involved in an 11-car crash at Talladega.
"I will do whatever I can to help my teammates [Johnson and Gordon] win it if I can't win it," Earnhardt said. "That is the attitude for the rest of the season."
But Johnson, seeking to become only the second Cup driver to win three consecutive titles (the other was Cale Yarborough in 1976-78), stays aggressive by always viewing himself as the underdog even if he's ahead.
This year is no exception.
