Our viewer's guide gets you up to speed for Talladega

• Drivers' main goal: avoid the middle of the pack
• Will missed practice, no Nationwide event leave some unprepared?
• Matt Kenseth, Greg Biffle want to prove their teamwork can yield victory

Playing both ends against the middle

Unlike Oreo cookies, the Star Wars trilogy and most professional athletes' careers, the good stuff isn't in the middle at Talladega Superspeedway. Drivers will spend the first 400 miles scrambling to stay way ahead or far behind of the freight train of cars undulating inches apart at 200 mph.

The theory is if you're in the pack, you stand a good chance of being collected in a mayhem of twisted sheet metal when the chaos inevitably breaks.

Of course, this begs the question that if everyone is trying desperately to stay at the point or incessantly lollygagging to bring up the rear ... how does a car wind up in the dreaded middle?

"Unfortunately, you just find yourself right there," said Clint Bowyer, who will start third Sunday. "That's absolutely where I don't want to be. If I'm in the middle of this thing before halfway, I'm going to the back. I'll pull over on the apron or do something."

For Bowyer and the other 11 drivers in the Chase for the Sprint Cup, Sunday could be a ballet of balancing the risk of losing the draft by running at three-quarter throttle against the hazards of being trapped within a phalanx of cars that offer no hope of escaping.

Many might trade a sterling result for the certitude of avoiding calamity that could eviscerate championship hopes with the bobble of a steering wheel. In last October's race, Brad Keselowski was the only Chase driver to finish in the top five, and seven finished 25th or worse as several played it safe.

How long to hang back?

Sandbagging, though, is trickier than it seems.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jimmie Johnson learned it the hard way last October. The Hendrick Motorsports teammates ran at the tail end of the lead lap for the first 177 laps before Earnhardt declaring they would "hammer through the middle" before a restart with 10 laps remaining.

The strategy backfired as the Nos. 48 and 88 Chevrolets each lost a spot.

That dynamic will change Sunday because of the eradication of the two-car tandems that were prevalent last year. Without having his fortunes tied to another driver, Earnhardt has vowed to turn Sunday into a "no-holds-barred" display of aggression in hopes of reclaiming the form from the halcyon era when he won a record four straight races on the 2.66-mile oval.

But Johnson says for drivers who elect to lay in the weeds, knowing when to slam the gas will remain a tricky proposition -- partially because of the caution flags that might be triggered by impetuous moves of drivers madly fighting through traffic.

"There's no way to plan it out right," said Johnson, who hasn't finished in three previous restrictor-plate races this season. "The game has changed from where we were last year."

No practice makes imperfect

In a strategy that surely would have made a NASCAR fan of Allen Iverson, many teams sat out most of nearly two hours of practice Friday.

Because rules changes have constricted the ability to tune their cars, drivers and crew chiefs apparently saw little upside to risking any damage or stressing motors before 500 miles Sunday. Couldn't they have used the extra laps to navigate the always finicky draft?

"I might be the first one to crash Sunday, but I don't think so," said No. 2 qualifier Ryan Newman, who turned a whopping five practice laps and was among 11 drivers who skipped the final session.

Cars running three wide and 10 deep at 200 mph on 33-degree banking ... what possibly could go wrong?

Well, a lot, of course. This marks only the second race since the return of pack racing to Talladega, and the frantic style once engendered frequent crashes that claimed as many as 26 cars in one swoop.

There are portentous signs that Sunday again could become a fabricator's nightmare.

Pole-sitter Kasey Kahne says there's more chatter about pushing the envelope than in recent seasons, and Denny Hamlin is expecting the first 490 miles to be more intense before an always frenzied closing sprint.

The confluence of minimal practice and more potential action has some worried. Bowyer lamented the lack of a Nationwide race Saturday at Talladega that he could race to get acclimated better.

"All of the craziness that I was fixing to get into at the end of the Cup race, I had already seen it, and you got used to it," he said. "We don't have that experience and practice going into it like we used to, (and) that adds to the nervousness a bunch."

The team to watch …

is Roush Fenway Racing, which will be trying to strike the perfect blend of going too fast or too slow.

Since winning the Daytona 500, Matt Kenseth has found himself on the losing end of the closing laps of a restrictor-plate race twice -- each instance epitomizing the counterintuitive nature that restrictor-plate racing sometimes breeds.

At Talladega in May, Kenseth pulled away too quickly on a restart and got disconnected from teammate Greg Biffle, allowing winner Brad Keselowski and Kyle Busch to whiz past. At Daytona International Speedway in July, Kenseth dragged his brake excessively to stay connected to Biffle, and Tony Stewart zoomed past them to the victory.

After an abysmal start to the Chase for the Sprint Cup for Biffle and Kenseth -- neither has finished in the top 10 through three races -- their Fords almost assuredly will be strong Sunday, and the outcome might be determined again by simple execution.

"I still feel like I need to be better, and I need to understand it better and make better decisions," Kenseth said of restrictor-plate races. "I felt like I had the fastest car in all three races and only won one of them. I'm thankful for the win, but on the other hand I feel like when you take the lead on a green-white-checkered finish – and I had Greg behind me – that we should have been able to figure out how to finish first and second, and I did a poor job of that."

Winning way

Strategizing how to win at Talladega is akin to the old Woody Allen joke about how to make God laugh (Answer: Make a plan). But Keselowski might have proved with his victory in May that there can be a method to the track's inherent madness.

The Penske Racing driver left his peers slackjawed with the sublime maneuver he made on Busch while leading on the last lap. Keselowski essentially didn't turn the wheel of his No. 2 Dodge entering Turn 3 and disconnected from Busch's No. 18 Toyota by sailing high up the banking.

Considering the driver who led entering the final lap of the previous four races at Talladega had lost, it was a genius move -- so much so that Keselowski was paraphrasing Albert Einstein when asked to explain how he had the common sense to attempt it.

"Common sense is a set of prejudice acquired from birth," he said. "For me, looking backward, it's obvious to say now that it worked. I just had this intuition of how Kyle would react and how the actual air would work just in theory. Obviously, the two came together, and it happened."

Will it be tried again Sunday? Even Keselowski admits it could be a long shot. If there are more than two cars battling in the lead draft, it's unlikely to work, and no one seems to be planning to mimic Keselowski because the opportunities for such gambits can disappear as quickly as an unguarded pile of firewood and beads in the Talladega infield.

"I just hope I'm in that position on the last lap," Tony Stewart said. "The hard thing is I don't know that there are ever two scenarios that are exactly the same. I'm not sure that what works for one guy is exactly going to work for another guy. That whole last lap you have to analyze every hundred feet what you are doing and what your plan is. You are pretty much calling an audible the whole way around trying to assess what (other drivers) are doing as a part of what you are going to have to do."