Driver has had tough season, but could go on tear

	The No. 16 car has had nothing but bad luck so far this season. George Tiedemann/GT Images/SI

It was, in retrospect, the key moment in last year's Chase for the Championship.

Turn the calendar back to Nov. 6 at Texas Motor Speedway, which is where the Cup boys will be racing on Sunday. Greg Biffle entered the race only 75 points behind Tony Stewart and appeared primed to make a hard charge at the points lead. After all, he had won the spring event at Texas.

In the November race he moved to the front by lap 37. But just three laps later he radioed his crew and said he felt a "bad vibration" in his left rear tire. A few laps later he made an unscheduled pit stop under green and fell a lap down, essentially ending his championship hopes. He finished the race in 20th and left Texas trailing Stewart by 122 points, a gap he couldn't close in the last two races. Biffle ended up losing the title by 35 points to Stewart, and the what-ifs from Texas haunted him the entire offseason.

So what, exactly, caused Biffle's tire problem at TMS in November? He thinks it may have something to do with his team's prerace decision to put a new spring in the left front tire. The spring didn't hold up and caused the No. 16 Ford to get loose through turns, which led to, he contends, the tire woes. The move to go with a spring that hadn't been tested, on a green-flag run, was an uncharacteristic mental lapse by Biffle and his crew chief, Doug Richert, but don't expect them to make a similar mistake on Sunday. It says here that the Biff kick-starts his season by making his first trip to Victory Lane.

Biffle has experienced more near misses and more bad luck than any other driver in NASCAR this year. He seemingly had a top 15 finish in the bag at the season-opening Daytona 500, but he cut a tire on the last lap and wound up 31st. The next week he had the dominant car in California and appeared to be headed for Victory Lane when his engine blew; he finished 42nd. He had a handling problem in Las Vegas (eighth), fuel issues in Atlanta (16th), tire difficulties in Bristol (seventh) and last week at Martinsville he finished 31st after being forced into the garage early when he made contact with Jeff Burton.

Biffle is 18th in points, but he could go on a nice little tear given the upcoming schedule. On Sunday he'll be driving the same car he piloted at California earlier this season and won with last year at Michigan and Homestead. Plus, the Roush Racing Fords have been dominant at Texas, winning five of the 10 Cup races there. After Texas the circuit shifts to Phoenix, where Biffle came in second last fall.

Biffle can probably afford one or two more finishes outside the top 25 over the next 20 races and still sneak into the Chase, but the margin for error for the breakout driver of 2005 is getting smaller by the week. "We've had a little bad luck this year," says Biffle, who won a Series-high six races last year, "but we've got some really good tracks coming up and I know the team's ready for them."

They'd better be. Otherwise, the 16 crew could be eliminated from the Chase before the Fourth of July.