When the Nextel Cup Series returns to action Saturday night at Phoenix International Raceway, its teams begin a stretch of 13 points races in 14 weeks.

The non-points NASCAR Nextel All-Star Challenge at Lowe’s Motor Speedway occupies the other weekend in that stretch, so the next weekend off for Cup teams doesn’t come until the end of July.

By that time, they’ll be 20 races into the season, leaving just six events beyond that to decide who’ll make the Chase for the Nextel Cup and who won’t.

If you’re on the outside of the top 10 right now, it’s still early.

“We were just knocking on the door of the top 10, and then with one bad race we dropped back to 17th,” said Kurt Busch, who lost ground with a 34th-place finish at Texas Motor Speedway. “If we have a couple of good races in a row, that will put us right back in position to be steadily right there and ready for the top 10.”

Busch stands 123 points out of 10th in the standings. The last time he raced at Phoenix he won – a year ago this weekend in the track’s first spring race. He never got the chance to go for a fifth straight top 10 at Phoenix in the fall after being suspended for the season’s final two races by Roush Racing.

But only four of the drivers in last year’s Chase are in the top 10 right now. One of last year’s title contenders, Rusty Wallace, has left the Cup Series. But Busch and four others are on the outside looking in, and at least three of them seem to need a sense of urgency to get things turned around in the right direction.

Kurt Busch celebrates his victory during the spring race last season at Phoenix International Raceway. Phoenix kicks off a long stretch of races that can make or break a team's season.

There’s already been a big change for Carl Edwards, who’s 22nd after seven races and will have Wally Brown as his new crew chief beginning this weekend in the Subway 500 at Phoenix. His former crew chief, Bob Osborne, has been shuffled over to the No. 26 team to try to jumpstart Jamie McMurray’s season.

Greg Biffle, meanwhile, is one spot behind Edwards in the standings and 406 points behind leader Jimmie Johnson. And Jeremy Mayfield, who has been in Chase in each of its first two years, is already at the point of crisis at 35th in the standings and 295 points out of 10th place.

For those drivers who are in the top 10 right now, the coming weeks offer a chance to solidify their hold on a spot in the Chase.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. missed the Chase last year, but right now he’s sixth in the standings going into two of his best tracks, historically. He crashed at Phoenix last fall and finished 40th, but before that he’d scored four straight top-five finishes there including a pair of victories. And before finishing 15th and 40th at Talladega last year, he’d finished first five times and second twice in the previous seven races there.

But Earnhardt Jr. doesn’t want to count on only running well where he has before.

“I want to be in the groove all the time,” he said. “We’ve had great-driving cars every week. I want to continue to go to the track (and) not be scrambling to get in the ballpark.

“We do have a couple of tracks coming up that we do traditionally run well on”