Biffle's chances are slim

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) -- Greg Biffle opened the season as the driver to beat. Winner of five of the first 15 races, Biffle was nearly untouchable and a solid bet to win the Nextel Cup championship.
But with two races remaining this season, Biffle is a long-shot -- at best -- to win his first title.
He's faded to fourth in the Chase for the championship standings, 122 points behind leader Tony Stewart.
Biffle has accepted that he'll need near-miracles this week in Phoenix and in the season-finale in Homestead, Fla., to make up the ground.
"It looks like we're not out of it," he said. "But it's going to take a big turnaround for us to be on the podium in Homestead."
So what's happened to Biffle, a driver who started the Chase in second place, only five points out of the lead?
On paper, it looks as if he's done everything right. Biffle has scored four top-10 finishes through the first eight Chase races, and his lowest effort was a 27th in Talladega.
Good competition
The problem is that his competition -- Stewart, Jimmie Johnson and now teammate Carl Edwards -- all have produced slightly better results. It put Biffle in position of needing a flawless run last weekend in Texas, a track he dominated during the spring en route to one of his wins.
But a loose wheel set the tone for a long, frustrating day on Sunday. Biffle was forced to pit under green to fix it, and he struggled the rest of the race to get back on the lead lap. He finished 20th, but it could have been worse: Biffle made several spectacular saves to keep his car off the wall during numerous spinouts.
"It's not over and I'm not giving up, but I am also realistic," Biffle said after the race. "We needed a good day. We had a bad day."
Those days are hard for Biffle to accept. An ultra-competitive driver who never has shied away from pointing fingers when things go wrong, Biffle has waited a long time for his shot at a Cup title and hates to see it slip away.
At 35, he's much older than the typical upstart driver. But that's because his path to stardom was never clear. Friends helped him get the attention of car owner Jack Roush, who was impressed but didn't really have a place to put Biffle.
Started in truck series
So Biffle started in the truck series, where he gave Roush his first NASCAR championship at any level. Then it was on to the Busch Series, where Biffle became the only driver in NASCAR history to win both that championship and the truck title.
At last, Roush had a slot for Biffle in 2003 on a startup team in the Cup series. He was a teammate of Mark Martin, Matt Kenseth and Kurt Busch, but his team was far behind those established groups.
Biffle's team struggled mightily that year, and even though he scored his first career win at Daytona in July, heavy personnel changes were made in what the Roush organization described as "stripping down the team, then building it back up."
It took all of 2004 to get the team equal with Roush's other cars, and Biffle closed out the year with a win at Homestead that set the stage for his strong opening this season.
Not winning s much
Nothing has changed for Biffle or his team from the start of the year to now, but he's not winning like he was. His last victory was June 19 in Michigan, the week before Stewart started his streak of five wins in seven races and supplanted Biffle as the driver to beat.
"The cars that we were winning with in the beginning of the season really are similar to what we have now," Biffle said. "People learn throughout the season and catch up. We worked hard over the wintertime, and I think we were a little ahead of the competition.
"The competition has caught up. It's clear that Tony Stewart and all those teams -- which keep in mind, they were all right there, second, third, fourth, when I was winning those races -- so they are the ones kind of getting a couple of the wins and we are right behind them. So we are not that far off. We're just not dominating like we were."
May be too late
And now it might be too late to make up much ground. Biffle heads to Phoenix, where he's never finished higher than 13th and was 41st in April. His 23 average finish at Phoenix is ninth among Chase drivers.
Stewart, meanwhile, has won at Phoenix before, Johnson has a career-high finish of second, and Edwards is on a roll with two consecutive wins.
"I'm not feeling as optimistic, obviously," Biffle said. "But anything can happen. Jimmie has not run that well at Phoenix, if he ends up 18th, I win the race, Tony gets crashed, or something happens to Tony Stewart's car, that puts us right in the position with having to beat them by only about five spots at Homestead to win the title.
"So I'm saying we're not out of it."
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