=== The Inside Line: Kansas turns out to be the Chase 'wild card' ===
 
 By Chris Symeon, Motorsports Editor
 
 Philadelphia, PA (Sports Network) - Talladega Superspeedway has generally been
 the "wild card" in the 10-race Chase for the Sprint Cup championship.
 
 Not this time.
 
 Sunday's 400-mile race at Kansas Speedway took the honors as the crapshoot in
 this year's Chase after all the crashes, cautions and chaos that occurred
 there.
 
 The Oct. 7 event at Talladega featured a 25-car crash on the final lap, which
 involved most of the title contenders, including Jimmie Johnson, Clint Bowyer,
 Dale Earnhardt Jr. and defending series champion Tony Stewart.
 
 But Kansas was a wild affair from start to finish on the track's newly repaved
 surface. It featured both a track and Sprint Cup Series season-high 14
 cautions, mostly for wrecks. When all was said and done, Matt Kenseth drove
 into victory lane with cosmetic damage to his car, while the point-separation
 between leader Brad Keselowski and second-place Jimmie Johnson remained the
 same at seven, despite both drivers having a grueling day.
 
 "With a hundred (laps) to go, I was thinking to myself, 'Man, this really had
 to be entertaining for everybody to watch'," Kenseth said. "There was a lot of
 wild stuff happening."
 
 With a new coat of asphalt and the addition of variable banking in the turns
 at Kansas, Sprint Cup teams faced the unknown when they arrived at this once-
 labeled "cookie cutter" 1.5-mile racetrack. In addition to the regularly
 scheduled weekend practice sessions, NASCAR granted teams two days of testing
 at Kansas earlier in the week to familiarize themselves with the track
 changes.
 
 In a season that has featured a less-than-normal amount of cautions and wrecks
 compared to previous years, Kansas was more than just a race. It was survival
 of the fittest.
 
 "I said when we finished Talladega that somebody should make 'I Survived
 Talladega' T-shirts," Keselowski said. "Well, I didn't know coming to Kansas
 it was going to be the same. Just wrecks and accidents and blown tires,
 everything you can imagine happened today. I felt really lucky to survive it."
 
 Many of the incidents at Kansas were a result of tires blowing. Goodyear used
 a harder compound for its tires there.
 
 Keselowski survived Kansas with an eighth-place finish, maintaining his
 points lead with just four races remaining.
 
 "Everybody has been asking all season long where have all the cautions been?"
 he said. "The answer is that they flew to Kansas."
 
 In what could have been a huge blow for his hopes of winning a sixth Sprint
 Cup championship, Johnson bounced back from a wreck at the halfway point to
 finish one spot behind Keselowski in ninth. While running at the tail end of
 the lead lap, Johnson spun around and hit the wall in turn four. He managed to
 stay on the lead lap after making numerous pit stops for a new deck lid and
 other necessary repairs. Johnson then benefited from a pair of late-race
 cautions to rally for a top-10 run.
 
 Like most other drivers in the Chase, Johnson was happy to leave Kansas
 unscathed in points.
 
 "It was crazy," he said. "It's weird that all the cautions came back. Now we
 see this type of driving at all the racetracks, but we don't get cautions out
 of it, and (Sunday) we got a lot of cautions out of it. Restarts were pretty
 wild. You had to run so hard that when something happened and you lost grip,
 the car just stood up on the tires and would take off, and you couldn't
 control it, and the guys were sliding everywhere."
 
 While Kansas did little to shake up the Chase standings, Greg Biffle took the
 biggest hit in points. Biffle, who ended the 26-race regular season as the
 points leader, finished 27th after he was one of many causalities in the
 wreck-filled race at Kansas. He slapped the wall on lap 176 and spent more
 than 30 laps in the garage for repairs before returning. He dropped from sixth
 to 11th in the rankings.
 
 After yellow-flag fever plagued Kansas, it's likely we could see another
 caution-filled race this coming Sunday at Martinsville Speedway. Martinsville,
 which is 0.526-miles in length, is the only short track on the Chase schedule
 and is considered a wild card as well.
 
 10/22 18:29:25 ET

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