So it sucks? Hell yea it does.......but you know what, I refuse to give up on this team I refuse!!!

Do other guys have to have bad luck? Of course, but we've seen it happen for some of them each race.........do we have to run well every race? Of course we do, but the tracks coming up we def can do it and win a lot of them.

Jimmie was 248 with 6 to go.......and only lost the title by 8 points

so we have 7 races, 273.........it can be done

and I will be behind this team to the end

Dedication. Drive. Determination.

We Believe!

That's ok, Kasey! :clap Just keep on doing the best you can!

After this CRAZY race... I've decided that it really is true that ANYTHING could happen... thus I still believe that stranger things (IE this race) have happened and Kasey comming back and winning the championship wouldn't be so strange...

WE're gonna need some help from other drivers again... wrecking and what not... but at the rate this chase is going... anything could happen to help us out.

Like I've said before... it aint over till the checkard flag waves at Homestead!

I STILL BELIEVE

Even if he can't win the Championship, I can deal with a top 5... but anything can and will happen. Burton needs to have some bad luck in order to close things up.

Just move onto 'Dega, and we'll see what happens there!

Oh, and something WILL happen there.


I still believe. :)

you know what.......

I think Kasey can win Dega, I know that sounds crazy but this is a DIFFERENT Dega, they repaved the track.......

I think he's gonna win :)

I believe in Kasey and the 9 team and think they will do everything in their power to get the best finishes as possible over the next seven weeks. If that gets them the Championship, awesome. If not, I'm still damn proud of my driver and his team and I'll be cheering for them no matter what.

Come on Kasey!!!! You can do it! :drive

you're right it is a different Dega. Who knows what is going to happen.


Kasey can do it I'm not going to give up until the :checkered at homestead

Right now I'm shaking and in tears. I still believe he can do well, but that was not what the team needed. They've got to get it going and 'Dega, they've got to.

This week wasn't so hard for me to swallow honestly.

I BELIEVE! I BELIEVE! I BELIEVE!

I hate this because I'm torn. But I'm trying to stay positive, but week after week of bad luck, that positive attitude is starting to run dry. :(

I still believe!

well I dont think he can win it at this point, and dont say im being negative, im being realistic, do i still think he can go out there and win some of the final races, hell yeah, i want him to just go out and have fun, being that far down in the poitns is probably just stressful for him instead of fun....


ugh sidenote I just threw a pillow at my tv because they jsut played that "you lose" commercial about fuel mileage that kasey is in.. lol

I still believe that the team can go out and run well and win. The Championship...I'm torn, I still want him to be able to go out and do it. But realistically, the guys ahead of him are all going to have to have some pretty bad luck. And I really don't see that happening.

Call me negative if you want.....but I think it's out of reach at this point.

It's okay to think the title is out of reach. I think it is too. Today was easier for me to take though, because I thought last week that it was out of reach too. Honestly I think that anyone more than 100 points out now is racing now just for wins.

All im really hoping for is that this crap doesnt get him down and he goes out and wins some more dang races...hell, 5 wins, most in the season, ya lets make it like 7 or 8

Well I have enough negativity in my life. I need something that I can think positively about. For me that is in this teams ability to overcome bad days. I WILL NOT STOP BELIEVING UNTIL THEY ARE MATHMATICALLY ILLIMINATED!!!!!

I'm with you on that one!

Yeah, you could be right. I don't want to think that, because Jeff is -120 out.....but it's going to be extremely tough for him.

:drive Keep on, keeping on, Kasey!! ANYTHING can happen in a race!

my feelings are so up in the air right now, I want more than anything for him to be able to pull it together and win the championship, but for that to happen everybody ahead of him needs to have problems. Big problems. It could happen but yeah...

Right now my hope is a top 5 finish to the season, and a great start for next year.

All in all though, however this season ends, I am SO proud of that little driver and his crew! This has been a helluva year! :checkered

You took the words right outta my mouth. He can win races, but I think the Championship is done, not unless the other guys have some major problems in the coming weeks.

But even if he doesn't win the Championship, this team and us fans have nothing to be disappointed in. Compared to last season, this season has been a dream come true I think. With all the poles, all the wins and everything else that has happened. This season has been good to us and we can't complain at all.

7 or 8 wins on the year........

eh, I think he's gonna finish with 10.

I think Kasey has a real strong shot at 4 of the last 7 and I think any of the other 3 he can win at......so I think he finishes the year with an even 10

Of course no matter what its going to be one hell of a great year, but I refuse to give up on them.......cause I know they are capable of going out there reeling off the wins and making the rest of the teams be perfect to keep them behind.

And we've seen at least 2 Chasers have problems every race so far.....and actually the trend has been that one of the Chasers that has a problem one race, has a problem the next also

Loudon-Kyle and Jimmie
Dover- Kasey, Kevin and Kyle
Kansas- Kasey and Jeff (could add Matt here)

so in the first 3 at least 2 have had problems........so if the trend continues everyone should find trouble before the year is out.

Anything can happen, none of us know.......but right now all Kasey and crew can do is go out and win, do the best possible and Make the rest of them perform to keep him back.

Anything can happen and I still believe Kasey and this team can do it. :good

~ Mary

I still believe in the team, but I don't believe in the Cup. I just don't think that's within our reach anymore. I'm trying really hard to be optimistic, but it's just getting harder and harder to stay upbeat and positive.

I do, however, think that our bad luck has happened for good. We had 3 straight crummy weeks, bad things happen in 3s. I'm not that worried about Talladega, because, well, it can't get much worse. I don't think he can win there (though I would not be surprised if he pulled it off, or if Tony did something to help us out), but I'm not worried about the big one.

My biggest frustration right now is that I know we're better than a 10th place finish this year. And I feel like people are starting to view EMS as a joke when it comes to the Chase. I really want Kasey to prove everybody wrong, but we've got so much ground to make up and not everybody is going to say "well, after finishing 23rd in the points they finished 10th, job well done." No, they're going to look at the wins and the poles and the top-fives and top-tens and say "what the hell is wrong with this picture?"

I know we can only build on this year next year, and hopefully learn from the mistakes we've made throughout the year. But miscalculating gas mileage by 5 laps just can't happen. Driving off-course on the last lap at a road course for no apparent reason can't happen. We're much better than that, but the mistakes are kind of glaring sometimes.

Sigh. I'm all over the place right now with my thoughts and I don't really feel like I'm articulating myself very well at all. So basically I'll just say I haven't given up on the team or the driver or the organization. But I pretty much have given up on a title this year. Which is ok -- it's only his 3rd season. There will be plenty of championships in his future.

Is it really a case of too much too fast? There's been a lot of times this year Kasey hasn't shown the maturity he needs to get over the hump, but at the same time, this team and driver have shown that they can overcome when their backs are against the wall. Somethings gotta give and I believe Talladaga is gonna be one hell of a wreckfest.

Well said! I think that we can still do it! Anything is possible as we have seen many times this year already. The 9 Crew is not one to give up and I am not going to give up on them. I still believe!

I feel the same way.

I am sick of reading and hearing about how EMS can make the show but aren't good enough to contend for the championship. Kasey is only in his third year in cup, they got a new nose last year that threw everyone for a loop with handling.

Maybe now Kasey will have a little less stress if he thinks the cup is out of the picture. Maybe he can go out there and blow everyone out of the water and show them all how talented we know all here know he is.

Jimmie Johnson has been in the Chase the first 3 years and doesn't have a championship yet. What does that say about Hendricks. Nobody says anything.


I will never stop believing the talent of Kasey or the whole 9 team. He has so many more years to win the cup.

the 9 team is a growing team that has had more than their fair share of bad breaks.......

but its been an awesome year, Kasey isn't going to finish 10 in points cause this team isn't going to settle for that.

I fully will not give up on the championship until its totally out of reach......I not saying its not a long shot, cause it is. EVERYTHING has to go right, but things do happen and this team rocks when their back is against a wall. The pressure really is off them.......they just have to go out there and race, its the other guys in front of him that have to keep performing to keep their position.

If there is an organization that is building strong for next year and everyone is worried about......its EMS, they are getting the new nose they wanted, they've got 2 great teams in the 9 and 10 and they are getting the 19 on track. It makes me excited not only for future years, but right now too. Kasey takes to new surfaces well, at homestead in 2003 the surface was new for the Busch cars and he went out and won, this year at Lowe's it was another new surface and he won.......its Dega, but its a different Dega and I think he can win at it. Kasey actually is a great RP track racer, he's just been count up in things. Of course there will be a big one and we'll have to be lucky just like everyone else to make it through.....but they've just got to go out there and run their race and hope for the best.

One awesome thing I think is going to come out of this season is Kasey is going to be the main reason we finally get something done to the points, our boy has proved that winning doesn't help you nearly as much as a bad finish hurts you. Thats an issue NASCAR has to address.

I refuse to give up and anybody that wants too can call me crazy, but I've seen stranger things happen in my life....so I'm going to give it a few weeks and see where they are. No matter what does happen, I won't be disappointed cause I know my driver has had one hell of a year.

Go Kasey Go!

Honestly, I think if they wanted to address it, they should have done so in 2004, when Jimmie Johnson had 8 wins and still lost the title. I wish they would award more points, but I think we all going to be surprised at what happens.

they should have.........

but I think this year might have been the final straw, the media has been all over it talking about wins meaning nothing

and if Jeff Burton wins this championship with one win the whole year(and he nearly didn't even have that) there will be even more talk about it

To win the cup would require his competitors to finish poorly multiple times. And that many drivers finishing poorly that many times...just isn't going to happen. Within the top 5, perhaps. But 1st, I don't think that's in the cards anymore.

I just don't think the team is championship caliber-yet. It's coming, perhaps, but certainly not this year. The kind of mistakes that have set him back-those are what are killing him now. As a friend of mine said-Indy, Watkins Glen-he can't have those kind of "rookie mistakes" now, especially not as a third year driver. And the crew chief as well as the fuel person cannot miscalculate by as many laps as they did-5, perhaps more on account of the fact that he was conserving. That's 7.5 miles, so well over one gallon of fuel...out of a 22 gallon tank, I consider that a pretty big error. It's these kind of things holding the 9 team back-and these kind of things will have to be fixed before EMS has the Nextel Cup.

I'm just tired of having that feeling of being kicked in the balls. trust me, it hurts.

I don't know if this had any difference on fuel mileage, but I was at the race yesterday and it was very wind during the race. At that point in the race there was a pretty good head wind down the backstretch. I know Kasey was trying to conserve fuel, but with the wind and a tight race car they came up short.

It didn't help that he ran out going into turn one and the engine killed as soon as he enter pit road. I believe he could have made it to his pit if he would have ran out going into turn 3.

Right now it is a luck factor championship. Take Jeff Burton, that was so lucky that he didn't hit Newman at the beginning of the race. Kyle Busch has also had no luck, and then Jeff Gordon yesterday.

Do I think someone can be lucky all 10 races? I don't know. That is an awful lot of luck.

Anything is going to happen. The next 7 races are going to be crazy.

I don't know if he has a chance to win the championship this year. Top 5, maybe.

And like others have been saying, I'm not being negative. I am being realistic.