Martin Truex Jr. and Kasey Kahne take the front row for Sunday's Atlanta 500

  On the pole, Martin Truex Jr., for Sunday's Lame Duck 500 (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
  
  

   By Mike Mulhern
   mikemulhern.net

   ATLANTA
   Appropriately, perhaps, with lame and lame-duck drivers all over the place here, Martin Truex Jr. -- a lame duck driver for Chevy's Chip Ganassi's, and headed next season to Michael Waltrip's Toyota team -- took the pole (184.149 mph) Saturday evening for Sunday night's Atlanta Pep Boys 500.
   Until breaking his foot playing Frisbee the other day Carl Edwards would have been among this weekend's favorites. But he's hobbling around the Atlanta Motor Speedway garage on crutches.
   Bobby Labonte and David Gilliland are also suddenly lame ducks, more figuratively, as are David Stremme and Jamie McMurray, and probably a few more men too.
   So the dynamics of these last two events before the post-Richmond playoff cut for the Sprint Cup championship may be a little out of whack. Throw in some new Goodyears, and a night event (7:30 p.m. or so), which should make for a very grippy track, and who knows what might happen here.
   The big question, of course is the crowd. Will there be one, and how big?
   The past five years this weekend's NASCAR stop has been in Los Angeles. And for the decades before that, it was at legendary Darlington Raceway.
   Can Atlanta Motor Speedway succeed?
   For that matter, can Truex pull something off here? He's been on the tour since 2004, but has only one win, at Dover in the spring of 2007. And he hasn't shown that much this season.
   But Truex is powered by engines from the Richard Childress-Richie Gilmore department, and that may be key. Childress' own race teams, all four, have been in a funk most of the season; none of the four will make the playoffs, an embarrassment, and not something sponsors like to have to deal with.
    So Childress has been shaking things up. The latest move was to promote engineer/crew chief Scott Miller to head of competition for the company. Miller has been running Jeff Burton's team, and he'll apparently continue doing that while taking a larger team role too.

   "It's been a tough year," Truex said. "But we've been battling hard."
   One question: will veteran crew chief Kevin 'Bono' Manion follow Truex to Waltrip's?
   While Truex has had good runs here, and Kahne too, the men to watch in Sunday's race are Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon, Kyle Busch, Kurt Busch, Mark Martin, Brian Vickers, and Tony Stewart.
   One big question much of the season has been the Jack Roush Ford operation, which simply hasn't sizzled. The latest reports are that Roush engineers are making a drastic chassis change in front-end geometry. The key to winning races these days is to get the race car to take a good 'set' at the end of the straight, right at the corner entry, and the roll through the corners strong. Hendrick teams, including the Stewart satellite operation, have shown a lot of strength at that part of the track.

   While the battle to make the 12-man playoffs is a hot one, with eight or nine men vying for the last six spots, with this race and Richmond next week the final two of the regular season, the fight for the Sprint Cup championship itself appears – honestly – to be down to three men, maybe four if Kyle Busch makes the chase: leader Stewart (off his worst finish of the season, 33rd at Bristol), Johnson, Gordon, and Kyle Busch. Someone else might win the title, but it appears quite unlikely. None of the others has shown any great strength or consistency this season.
   Johnson is going for a record fourth title; Stewart is going for his third championship; Gordon is a four-time champion but hasn't taken the title since 2001. Kyle Busch dominated the regular season last year but collapsed in the first three races of the playoffs.
   Goodyear has had tire issues here the last few races, so there's new rubber this time around. This is not only one of the fastest tracks in NASCAR but also one of the most abrasive, typically eating tires, particularly early in the race.
   "I was pretty happy with the tire, actually," Gordon said.  "I thought the tire was good. 
    "These conditions are very, very slick (in the heat of the afternoon, for practice and then early evening for qualifying).  That was a pretty tricky practice session -- where we're having to do mock qualifying runs where the track is 115 degrees.  That made it pretty challenging. 
    "Normally we have night qualifying (here), and it's super-fast, you're wide-open (with good grip).
   "The biggest challenge I see is that we're practicing during the day and we're racing at night. 
    "This place changes dramatically: It gains a lot of grip as the track temperature cools down. 
     "I expect it….but none of us really knows. We've got different tires, and the track is more worn. It's a guessing game for all of us. 
     "As the track cools, it will gain grip.  But how is the tire wear going to be? How is the fall-off (in speeds during a 100-mile tire run) going to be? What's the balance of the car going to be?
    "It's all a guessing game."
    However the championship chase is looking less and less like a guessing game: three Rick Hendrick teams battling it out, with everyone else looking for table scraps.
   "What I'm excited about in the chase is that the 1-1/2-mile tracks have been really good for us this year," Gordon says. "We've really improved over last year…and that's where we were lacking. 
     "We have to continue to push that, to make sure that we out-perform Tony, Kyle Busch and Jimmie…and who knows who else -- Carl Edwards and Mark Martin, any of these guys I think in this chase can be championship-caliber if they get it right."
    That may be politically correct but not quite the case.
    Gordon himself has a few specific worries: "Phoenix is certainly on our radar as a track that can be hit-or-miss for us. 
   "Talladega is what it is….
   "Other than that, we are really confident about the other tracks. 
    "Then it is about eliminating the mistakes – pit road, and pit stops…all those calls that are going to be made are going to be extremely important. And making the right ones and not making a mistake is going to be crucial."
    Momentum?
   Stewart has had it, but was the Bristol foul-up just an isolated circumstance or the start of a major fade? It's hard to imagine anyone going through an entire season as strong and as consistent as Stewart has been. Has he used up all his good luck?
   Johnson is a Mr. October, who once lost 150 points in an afternoon and then rallied with four straight playoffs to win the title. He's the home run hitter of the bunch, dangerous everywhere now.
   And Gordon?
   At one point earlier this season he felt he had the team to beat for the title.
   At the moment, however, "we've lost a little bit of that momentum….and I think some other guys have gained a little bit.
   "But I still feel we're capable of getting that back for the chase."

  
The starting lineup for Sunday's Atlanta Pep Boys 500