Halfway through the Chase for the Nextel Cup, it sure seems like there have been a lot of drivers trying to talk themselves out of contention.

Both Kasey Kahne and Kyle Busch, after missteps early in the 10-race playoff, declared their hopes for a championship had been dashed. Then, after Saturday night’s race at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, Jeff Gordon and Mark Martin seem resigned to the fact that this is just not going to be their year.

“It is just not meant to be for us this year,” Gordon said after dropping to 10th in the standings, 216 points behind leader Jeff Burton. “We are happy to make the Chase; from here on out we try to win races.”

Gordon certainly could do exactly that on Sunday at Martinsville Speedway, where he’s won seven times in his career and where he’s finished ninth or better in his past seven starts, with four victories in that span.

It would, however, take a rally of historic proportions for Gordon to win a fifth career championship this year. His undoing has come in the past three weeks. He had a fuel pump failure late in the race at Kansas and finished 39th, then got wrecked and was 36th at Talladega before the difficulty at Charlotte.

“It just hasn’t been in the cards for us these past three races,” Gordon said. “We’ve had some major problems that have taken us out of it. Maybe we can figure out some of these things that are happening and take that into next season and make improvements.”

Martin’s resignation to fate, however, could be premature.

MARTINSVILLE, VA - APRIL 02: A general view of the start of the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series DirectTV 500 on April 2, 2006 at the Martinsville Speedway in Martinsville, Virginia. (Photo by Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images for NASCAR)

“The championship is not really something that was meant for me ever, probably isn’t this year and it’s not going to get me down,” Martin said after being wrecked and finishing 30th at Charlotte.

Even though that only dropped him one spot to fourth in the standings, 102 points back, he did lose 92 points to Burton on Saturday. “We had a better chance before we wrecked,” he said.

That may be true, but Martin made up 60 points on Burton at Talladega just a week earlier when Burton had a flat tire with fewer than 10 laps remaining.

Matt Kenseth has come closest to keeping up with Burton in the Chase. He’s 45 points behind in second, but even he’s not all that happy with how things have been going.

“We’d be kidding ourselves to think we can win a championship operating like we did tonight,” Kenseth said after finishing 15th at Charlotte. “We’ve got some work to do. We just had problems with the car right from the get go and had problems really all night, everybody did. We’ve just got to go back and work on it.

“I don’t know what’s wrong. We ran good enough to probably run 10th tonight if we didn’t have any problems, but you know it’s not good enough to win a championship. We’ve got to do a lot better than this.”

Kahne felt the same way after finishing 38th at Dover and 33rd at Kansas. But when he finished second at Talladega and won last weekend, his outlook brightened despite the fact he’s still 160 points back.

“Things happen,” Kahne said. “You’re mad. You say, ‘Yeah, we’re out. But we’re in as much as anybody. … When my head has been clear and I haven’t just jumped out of a torn-up race car, I’ve thought we had a good enough team all season that we can make up as many points as possible. We just have to have good luck and other people have to have tough breaks.”

And Burton said Martinsville is a place where that can happen.

“I think Martinsville is a challenge for everybody every time we go there,” Burton said. “It’s such a unique race track. … I think that Martinsville will have a huge bearing on the points race because it’s so easy to mess up there. It’s easy to get in a wreck. It’s easy to break a transmission. It’s easy to burn the brakes off the thing.

“There’s so many things that happen at Martinsville every single time we go there. There’s a reason why people throw helmets at each other. When you unload at Martinsville, it’s like you have been dropped into another planet.”