Brad Keselowski faces Chase's biggest test

• Brad Keselowski needs a legendary performance Sunday
• Jimmie Johnson and Denny Hamlin have strong chance to gain points on leader
• Sprint Cup's shortest, oldest track will offer biggest Chase test

MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- During a 65-year existence that dovetails with the inception and rise of NASCAR, tiny Martinsville Speedway has been a rough-and-tumble showcase for the giants of stock-car racing.

Eight drivers have won at least six times at Martinsville, and it's a list of surefire Hall of Famers, current and future: Richard Petty, Darrell Waltrip, Jeff Gordon, Rusty Wallace, Dale Earnhardt, Jimmie Johnson, Fred Lorenzen and Cale Yarborough.

Brad Keselowski, 28, is decades from joining that pantheon, but he's been dreaming about it since he was a tyke who once snuck into garages to turn wrenches for his family's racing teams.

If he hopes to take a major step in building a candidacy for greatness with the 2012 Sprint Cup championship, he likely will need a performance in Sunday's Tums Fast Relief 500 as stirring as those sublimely unspooled by the legends who have ruled this 0.526-mile track.

The points leader will start 32nd on the shortest track on the circuit. When the green flag falls, he will barely be a quarter-mile ahead of pole-sitter Johnson, and Keselowski's prospects will be marginal for staying ahead of his closest pursuer in the Chase for the Sprint Cup without a spate of early caution flags.

The past three drivers to qualify 32nd at Martinsville fell a lap down within the first 101 of 500 laps -- Jeff Burton on Lap 44 in April 2011; Dave Blaney on Lap 101 last October; and Juan Pablo Montoya on Lap 53 in April.

But Keselowski, who leads Johnson by seven points with four races remaining, wasn't exhibiting much concern about overcoming his worst qualifying lap of the season for the No. 2 Dodge (which hasn't been listed this deep on a starting grid since starting 41st at Michigan International Speedway in June 2011).

"You take solace in the part that matters -- the actual racing," he said. "My team has done a great job preparing excellent cars and executing on all levels. You try to focus on what you have that's going right, and that's what we have.

"I thought (Kansas) was harder to pass than this weekend will be. And that's not to say it's going to be easy here at Martinsville but there is quite a few more variables that I think work to your favor with strategies. I feel confident that it'll work its way out here. Obviously it's a very, very long race. There are a lot of tools in our tool chest to help us recover from that."

Indeed, the modus operandi for Keselowski and crew chief Paul Wolfe has been to gain scads of positions -- and sometimes steal victories -- with aggressive strategy gambits that rarely have failed. Often by pitting out of sequence early in a race or by taking two tires, Keselowski consistently has overcome an average starting position of 16.4 (including 17.5 during the first six races of the Chase).

It's partially a byproduct of a season that has featured long green-flag sequences, allowing Keselowski and Wolfe to play their cards without being busted by an ill-timed yellow.

But they'll need to hope for the antithesis at Martinsville, where a lengthy stretch of green (there were three ranging from 98 to 141 laps in the April race) can trap a couple of dozen cars a lap down.

Even if Keselowski and Wolfe benefit from several early caution periods that create the opportunity for an out-of-sequence strategy, it's still a dicey proposition to vault a slower car to the front because tires lose their adhesion so quickly on the flat oval.

In other words, said third-ranked Denny Hamlin, Keselowski probably will need to master Martinsville by himself.

"There won't be a strategy play," said Hamlin, who trails Keselowski by 20 points. "It would take something crazy. I don't even know how you could actually. Tires wear out so much. You're going to have to have all new tires on it all the time. I think that you're going to have to drive your way to the front."

Keselowski hasn't finished higher than ninth in five starts at Martinsville. He could flip the switch at the short track Sunday, but if he stumbles badly, it likely would equal a loss of major ground to his biggest rivals, who might be the two best active drivers at Martinsville.

Disaster is unlikely to befall Johnson, who is trying to become Martinsville's all-time winningest active driver with a seventh win, or Hamlin, who will start fifth seeking a fifth win at his home-state track.

"There's no reason that we should lose points to (Keselowski) this weekend," Hamlin said. "We need to gain six to seven (points) and the way to do that is to win. We need to win races, and we know it."

There'll be plenty of motivation, too, for Johnson, who could force Keselowski's hand by setting a blistering early pace that might trigger a frenzied scramble at the rear of the field among slower cars trying to avoid being lapped.

"The tough position there is once you get single file and get about 10 laps into the show, the leaders are to the (last-place) car," Johnson said. "You've got to go. Everybody around you has that same mentality too so it can be pretty cut- throat back there. The priority is to get going. You have got to get up into the 20s and get a buffer of cars between you and the leader so that things can kind of spread out and get into a rhythm."

And does the prospect of lapping Keselowski provide extra incentive for the five-time series champion?

"That will definitely be a priority, but I'm not going to do anything stupid to make that happen," Johnson said. "But if we can, I'll definitely be smiling in the race car."

Keselowski was smiling and laughing with his crew Saturday after improving from the 27th-fastest lap in an early practice to 13th in the final session.

Johnson and Hamlin, though, both said the pressure is mounting with each race as Keselowski tries to deliver the first championship to Penske Racing, and Sunday will be the sternest test.

"You can put that iron-clad armor around you, and think that it's not going to affect you, but it will eventually," said Hamlin, who faltered under the heat of leading the points entering the 2010 season finale. "It just continues to build and get harder to block out everything that you hear. You are thinking about all of your dreams coming true in just a matter of weeks.

"That definitely will affect you. It's just how you let it affect you, whether it be a positive or negative."

When it comes to the championship, Keselowski naturally is focusing on the former.

"I've thought about it since I was a little kid," he said.

"Certainly, we're closer to realizing it, but there's a lot of work to be done, and it would be a disservice to the work that we've done to let that get in your head and think so much about it that you don't focus on the work still to be done."

Sunday, that work could be a legendary task.