NASCAR’s Chase for the Sprint Cup championship begins this weekend in Loudon, NH.  The season thus far has been building up to this point.  Points are essentially reset for the top 12 drivers as of last Saturday’s race in Richmond.  The next 10 races are all about the Chase drivers.

The drivers contending for the 2009 championship are…

• Mark Martin
• Tony Stewart
• Jimmie Johnson
• Denny Hamlin
• Kasey Kahne
• Jeff Gordon
• Kurt Busch
• Brian Vickers
• Carl Edwards
• Ryan Newman
• Juan Pablo Montoya
• Greg Biffle

As you can see by the above list, Dale Earnhardt Jr didn’t make it in.  I really haven’t yet figured out who I think has the best chance to win the championship.  Although, my gut says Tony & Jimmie are very good early favorites to win it all.  It will boil down to whoever can have the most consistent (good consistency, that is) finishes for the remaining 10 races.  Who are you rooting for to win?

The drivers spent the past couple of days doing a whirlwind media tour in New York City.  Here is a clip of one of the appearances.

Photo by Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images for NASCAR

NASCAR 2009 has officially begun.  I’m quickly realizing that it is going to take a few races for me to get used to all of the new teams and also who is driving for who and in what car.  Even Hendrick Motorsports had a driver change in the off-season.  Mark Martin is now the driver of the No. 5 Kellogg’s Chevrolet.  (The 2009 HMS team is pictured above with their HMS 25th anniversary cars.)  The new HMS team and Tony Stewart’s new team – Stewart-Haas Racing – are going to make for one great group of drivers in 2009 (and great unofficial teammates at Daytona & Talladega).

Photo by John Harrelson/Getty Images for NASCAR

The first race (albeit a non-points awarding race) was last night.  Kevin Harvick won the 2009 Budweiser Shootout.  I wasn’t able to watch the race last night because my family went out to celebrate my mom’s birthday (which was actually during the ice storm last week).  It looks like Dale Jr finished 18th after a bit of run-in with Paul Menard (actually, PM running into him).  On to qualifying this afternoon, the Gatorade Duels Thursday, and finally the Daytona 500 next Sunday!

What do you think about the race last night?

What are your predictions for 2009?

I took over 600 photos while I was in Michigan at the NASCAR races.  The gallery of the best of these photos can be found here.  I wanted to post a special entry explaining some of the photos and to use some of them to explain more about the weekend.  Feel free to ask questions about any of the photos if you’d like more information than I give here or on the photo’s caption in Flickr.

Michigan International Speedway is location in Brooklyn, Michigan.  It seemed quite literally in the middle of nowhere.  There was a town closeby and the track had neighbors but nothing major and there was not really a major highway going in and out of the track.  (Oh yeah…Speaking of the road…A lot of people complain about traffic in & out of Texas Motor Speedway being some of the worst.  We don’t ever have problems at TMS.  MIS was much, much worse.)  Because the track is so close to Canada, there are a lot of Canadian NASCAR fans that come down for the race.  The track flies, not only an American flag, but also a Canadian flag.  Plus, we listened to both the Canadian and United States national anthems.

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