With just five races to go in the Chase for the Nextel Cup, Last Saturday night's 500 miler at Charlotte (Lowe's) Motor Speedway showed that no driver is out of this championship yet even if you are 200 points out.

For Kasey Kahne, last Saturday night showed that he is still the one to beat on 1.5 milers and bigger and that he is not out of this championship by no means. With that for the second straight week, Kahne, who has finished 2nd at Talladega and won last Saturday nights Charlotte race has brought himself to just over one race out in the championship.

On the flip side of that was Jeff Gordon who had troubles during the race and yet again finishing well down in the standings, now finds himself 10th -216 points out of the lead, but still in the hunt. But surprisingly, No one driver has yet taken off with this championship points lead and it appears that no one will.

For all ten of these drivers, the championship chase is not over, one bad finish for the points leader like what happened last week at Talladega and one good finish or even a victory by another chaser could result in as much as 156 point swing. Its still too early for anyone to say that they are out of this championship hunt, but if Jeff Burton continues with top 5-10 finishes for the remainder five races, only to top 5 in points will have any shot.

Point Standings and finishing position in last Saturday night's race in Charlotte:
1. Jeff Burton Leader and finished 3rd
2. Matt Kenseth -45 -- 14th
3. Kevin Harvick -89 -- 18th
4. Mark Martin -102 -- 30th
5. Dale Earnhardt Jr. -106 -- 4th
6. Denny Hamlin -137 -- 28th
7. Jimmie Johnson -146 -- 2nd
8. Kasey Kahne -160 -- Winner
9. Kyle Busch -195 -- 6th
10. Jeff Gordon -216 -- 24th

Going beyond the Chase and looking toward 2007, the Car of Tomorrow continues to make noise with another test session this time down at Homestead Motor Speedway. This test has 56 COT cars testing between Monday and Wednesday. Most of the Nextel Cup teams have COT's already made and now there is talk about several teams asking NASCAR to consider debuting the COT superspeedway program, a little early at the spring Talladega race instead of the fall Talladega race. It seems that with the repaving of the Talladega superspeedway, it has made the track very different from its sister track Daytona and that now teams must build all new cars for just that one race.

I like this idea too, its at least $150,000 per car plus labor to build and for some of these car owners, triple to five times that amount. Don't forget the backup car as well. I hate to say this, but a couple of weeks ago, Jeff Gordon made the comment that he would rather wait until 2008 and just run the COT and I still agree with that.

See Yeah!