In recent seasons, the Chase has been more like an invitation-only party. Not since 2007 has a non-Chase driver found his way to Victory Lane during the final 10 races of the season. But that hasn't always been the case -- particularly at Kansas Speedway, where non-Chase drivers crashed the party three out of four years, beginning with Joe Nemechek's victory in the 2004 Banquet 400.

True to his "Front Row Joe" nickname, Nemechek started on the pole, a day after winning the Nationwide Series race by less than a car-length in front of Greg Biffle. But he soon gave way to a series of Chase contenders, including Jeremy Mayfield, Biffle, Ryan Newman and points leader Kurt Busch. However, odd things were about to happen.

Sterling Marlin's car slowed at the drop of the green flag with transmission troubles. Then 16 laps in, Carl Edwards brought out the caution when he spun coming out of Turn 4.

“

It's kind of cool to see guys outside the top 10 up there leading laps and battling. We're giving them everything we can throw at them. The guys in the Chase have more to lose than we do. We're on the offense, not on defense.

”

-- JOE NEMECHEK

Then trouble began to plague the Chase contenders, one by one. Mark Martin suffered a cut right-front tire when he ran over debris from Kyle Busch's unintentional meeting with the outside wall right at the start-finish line. Kurt Busch and Jimmie Johnson spun on the backstretch on the same lap, but were lucky to avoid further disaster as the rest of the field was able to get by unscathed.

"We avoided a big pitfall today," Busch said. "I closed my eyes and turned the wheel and don't know how I didn't hit anything."

Busch's good fortune would be repeated in the season finale at Homestead, when he survived a tire problem to finish fifth and edge Johnson by eight points.

Accidents within five laps of each other then eliminated Newman and Johnson, and with 50 laps remaining, a majority of the lead-lap cars -- including most of the surviving Chase drivers -- came down pit road for service. However, Nemechek and Ricky Rudd gambled and stayed out. It turned out to be a wise decision.

Scored in fourth on the restart, Nemechek worked his way around Jamie McMurray and Rudd, then set his sights on leader Elliott Sadler. After a short duel, he passed Sadler on Lap 231 and then found himself in an unusual situation: having to conserve enough fuel to make it to the end without slowing down so much to allow the competition to catch up.

A conservation approach nearly cost Nemechek the win, as Rudd -- who nearly crashed when he was forced to the apron on the final restart -- and Biffle were both in the process of attempting to chase down the No. 01 in the closing laps.

"There at the end I was trying to save gas, and here comes Ricky Rudd out of nowhere," Nemechek said. "I was like, 'Holy Moly.' I had to get back on it. He got beside me one time, but I wasn't going to let it happen."

The two wound up side-by-side on the final lap, bumping door handles, before Nemechek was able to pull away from Rudd's No. 21 by .081 seconds for his fourth career victory.

"I caught him somehow and I got to his door, but my car was slipping and I had to ease off so I didn't take us both out," Rudd said.

After taking a backward victory lap in memory of his brother John, killed at Homestead in 1997, Nemechek was happy to have stolen the spotlight from the Chase contenders, at least for one race.

"It's kind of cool to see guys outside the top 10 up there leading laps and battling," Nemechek said. "We're giving them everything we can throw at them. The guys in the Chase have more to lose than we do. We're on the offense, not on defense."

One of the concerns in the first season of the Chase format -- and a continuing one since -- was whether non-Chase drivers would be considered incidental to the remainder of the season, and Rudd made a point to comment about it afterward.

"Hopefully Joe Nemechek was mentioned [on TV]," Rudd said. "Journalism and television ought to be what you see --- the same things the fans sitting in the stands saw."

Nemechek said out loud what many in the garage area had been thinking ever since the Chase format had been announced.

"Only time will tell how all this works," he said. "But you have to take care of all sponsors in this sport or they won't be here, and you won't have a full field of cars."

Non-Chasers would go on to win 10 of the first 30 Chase races, as Tony Stewart won three times in 2006. But since Biffle's win at Kansas in 2007, Chase contenders have dominated, having won 20 consecutive Chase races.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.