Since when did Greg Biffle and Kyle Busch trade cars?

This was supposed to be Busch’s Chase, right? Biffle was at best a long shot after showing only glimpses of being a contender during the regular season. When the Roush Fenway Racing driver won at New Hampshire, it was a good story, but hardly big news. When he came back to win last week at Dover, however, the wow factor rose dramatically.

No one — not even owner Jack Roush himself — could have predicted this. You don’t go 26 races without a win and suddenly go 2-for-2 in the Chase. This is the same team that in the middle of the season had five consecutive finishes outside the top 10 — three of them 20th or worse. Biffle had four finishes outside the top 10 in the final six regular-season races.

Coming into the Chase, he was an easy third on the depth chart at Roush Fenway behind Carl Edwards and Matt Kenseth, certainly not an afterthought but definitely not in the forefront of title talk.

So what’s happened? Has a light suddenly clicked on? Did he and Edwards swap teams? Is Robbie Reiser, the man behind Kenseth’s title who now oversees the Roush Fenway shop, now calling the shots for the No. 16 team? The answers are, yes, no and maybe. Greg Erwin is still the man in charge as Biffle’s crew chief, but it’s no secret that the driver likes to lean on Reiser’s wisdom.

Whatever the reason, it’s clear the team has picked the right time to get a handle on the COT. Even Biffle can’t put a finger on the difference, but he knows a good thing when he sees it.

“The feeling that we have as a race team right now is indescribable,” he said. “If we can keep it going, which I think we can, we’ll be unstoppable. As a driver, you dream about having a team like this at this point in your career. We’re not finished winning. I don’t see why we can’t make it three in a row this weekend.”

On the subject of this weekend, guess who is the defending champion of this race? Biffle won a rain-shortened event last year, and that win, coupled with his sizzling Chase start, has the driver more than a little confident.

“I’m a big believer in momentum,” he said. “You have to have confidence and you’ve got to have confidence in your team, your crew, everything, your equipment. Right now we’ve got a lot of confidence that we’ve got great equipment, good guys.”

Though Biffle’s sudden rise is a surprise, it wasn’t so long ago that he was a title favorite. He nearly won the 2005 championship and opened 2006 as a favorite, only to finish 13th in points. He finished just 14th a year ago when talk began to circulate that he might leave Roush Fenway.

What a difference a few months make. And now that Biffle is once again a title threat, he can lean on his experience in 2005 as the pressure mounts.

“What’s given me a lot of drive here in 2008 is we were so close in ’05,” he said. “I’m really thinking about what I need to do, what we did wrong in ’05 and what we can do right this year and really focus and concentrate. I am totally focused on this race team and doing whatever we can each week to win.”

Giving Biffle even more confidence was the recently concluded test at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, where the No. 16 topped the speed charts on the 1.5-mile track. There are five such tracks left in the Chase, beginning with Kansas today. Also, he owns career wins at Chase tracks Texas Motor Speedway and Homestead-Miami and has top-fives at Lowe’s and Atlanta.

One race he’s not so sure about is next week’s stop in Talladega, where the Roush Fenway cars usually struggle.

“Everybody is a little worried about Talladega,” Biffle said. “We know that’s kind of our wild-card race, sort of. Everybody has deemed it that way because there can be an accident that catches a bunch of cars up. And they tend to get pretty hairy at the end — people pushing and shoving and all kinds of things happen. So that’s really the only one I’m concerned about at this point.

“There aren’t any other tracks that really make me nervous at this point. We’re really good at Phoenix, and how well we ran at Loudon, I think, is going to reflect how well we’re going to run at Martinsville. All the rest of them, we’re really prepared for.”

Greg Biffle a title contender? You’d better believe it.

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