WINSTON CUP SERIES Kenseth alters style and builds huge lead

He had more wins last year, but is doing better overall this season.
By PETE IACOBELLI
ASSOCIATED PRESS
DARLINGTON, S.C. -- Matt Kenseth brushes aside talk that his steadiest of seasons could lead to NASCAR changing the way it awards points in the series standings.
Kenseth, who has built a 258-point lead over Dale Earnhardt Jr. with 14 races remaining, seems a lock for the championship.
The 31-year-old driver "kind of expected" some chatter about points.
"No matter what, they've got to find something to talk about, I guess," he said.
Kenseth's crew chief, Robbie Reiser, chuckled during lunch between test sessions at Darlington Raceway.
No one, he said, discussed changing the system last year when the No. 17 Ford was collecting more trophies than anyone else. Only now has it come up, Reiser said, with Kenseth regularly extending his margin while others celebrate wins.
"Either way, you can't win, I guess," Reiser said.
Unless you change your style, the way Kenseth did.
He knew after last season that despite the victories, he didn't have enough high finishes to win the series crown. And he said so when asked if his wins should have brought him closer to champion Tony Stewart in the final standings.
"I said no," Kenseth said. "I said, 'We won five races, but this is a 36-race schedule and in the other races we didn't do a good enough job to be consistent enough."'
Been very consistent
This year, no one has been more consistent as Kenseth's Roush Racing team.
His one victory was the UAW-Daimler Chrysler 400 at Las Vegas on March 3. Kenseth took the points lead the next week with a fourth at Atlanta Motor Speedway. He has had 14 top-10 finishes since then to cement a growing lead. Kenseth's worst showing in that stretch was 22nd at Martinsville's Virginia 500 in April.
Kenseth said the points system needs "to reward a team that makes its bad days a 15th-place finish and not its bad days a 40th-place finish. I think it should be about the whole team, not just the driver, and how consistent they can be all year."
Still, NASCAR vice president Jim Hunter has said officials would review the system "as we often do when there is talk about one driver having so big of a lead that it looks like the championship will be decided before the season is over."
The current system "probably could reward maybe a little bit more for winning," Kenseth said.
But more points doesn't mean harder racing. There could have been 1,000-points on the line at the Brickyard 400 two weeks back, Kenseth said, and his car would have run second to Kevin Harvick.
"If I could've won the race, I would've won the race," Kenseth said. "No matter how they set up the points, I don't think it's necessarily going to change the racing because everybody's trying to win. I mean, you're always trying to run as hard as you can."
Likes Darlington track
Kenseth isn't letting up on the throttle yet. He was the only one running laps this week at Darlington's tricky 1.366-mile oval before the Southern 500 on Aug. 31. Kenseth has long felt comfortable on the track's misshapen corners and gritty surface but wanted the confidence that comes with extra laps.
Kenseth won a Busch race here in 1999, but he has struggled at the Labor Day weekend race, never finishing better than 23rd in his past four Southern 500s.
With so much at stake, he was there to keep problems to a minimum.
"It's exciting where we're at," Kenseth said. "But yet on the other hand, we don't want to mess it up and don't want to make any mistakes either."