Richmond left to settle a three-way battle for Chase

Kyle Busch, Carl Edwards and Jimmie Johnson sit 1-2-3, respectively, in the Sprint Cup Series standings and combined to win all eight races in July and August.

Yet the focus in Saturday night's Chevy Rock & Roll 400 at Richmond International Raceway will be three drivers sitting 12th through 14th in the standings -- Clint Bowyer, David Ragan and Kasey Kahne.

Fast facts

What	Chevy Rock & Roll 400
When	7:45 p.m. ET Saturday
TV	ABC, 7 p.m. ET
Radio	MRN (Sirius Ch. 28), 6:45 ET

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At the completion of Saturday's race, the field for the fifth Chase will be set. Only the top-12 drivers in the standings qualify for the 10-race playoff that determines the series champion.

Busch, Edwards and Johnson, along with Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jeff Burton have clinched spots in the Chase. All Greg Biffle and Kevin Harvick need to do is start the race to clinch a spot.

Drivers eight through 11 -- Tony Stewart, Matt Kenseth, Jeff Gordon and Denny Hamlin -- would need something catastrophic to happen for them to miss the Chase.

Then there's Bowyer. He leads Ragan by 17 points and Kahne by 48. Besides being ahead of Ragan and Kahne, Bowyer has one other advantage over them: He won the last race at Richmond in May.

"I think it's a big confidence boost," Bowyer said. "Going into California [last week], I was worried about California. Those are the types of tracks we have been struggling at, and I was prepared to give up a little bit to the 6 [Ragan] and the 9 [Kahne], and it ended up we didn't give up much at all to the 9 and none to the 6.

"I had already had my mind-set made up that it was going to be OK to go into Richmond behind and have to make it up. Now we've just got to conserve what we've got and keep it."

Kahne began a hot streak in May and reeled off wins at Charlotte and Pocono. As recently as three races ago at Michigan, Kahne was 11th. But an early wreck the next week at Bristol knocked him all the way back to 14th.

"I went into Michigan kind of thinking that we had been running really strong, we had been right there every weekend," Kahne said. "I felt like maybe we had a shot at maybe being sixth in points, maybe passing Jeff and Tony, and then just racing happens. Things happen, and we're 14th looking in now."

Kahne has been in this position before. He was 30 points outside the Chase qualifiers going into Richmond in 2006 and raced his way in with a third-place finish.

"All I learned was really to just run your race, do everything you can possible," Kahne said. "We led laps that night and we were one of the better cars throughout the entire night, and that's the only way you're going to make the Chase is to be up front and be strong and have a shot at winning. I think that will be the only chance that we have at making the Chase is if we are one of the top three or four cars."

In his second full season, Ragan, 22, has been one of the year's biggest surprises. He has five top-five finishes and tied his career best with a third at Michigan three weeks ago.

"The bottom line is we've just got to go out and beat these guys," Ragan said. "No other way around it. We can't count on the other teams having problems or issues throughout the race. We've got to make sure we are on our toes and we don't have any mechanical failures or any screw-ups in the pits and also on the racetrack.

"We're tense and we're thinking about it, but we've just got to go out and run our race, and whether we make the Chase or not is not going to depend on just the one race at Richmond. I could go back all the way to the Daytona 500 and talk about things that I would have done different and would have gotten us different results."