For Kasey Kahne, a good finish in Sunday’s Kobalt Tools 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway would also be a good start.

After losing an engine and finishing 38th at California, then crashing and finishing 35th last week at Las Vegas, Kahne finds himself in an early hole in the Nextel Cup standings. Add in a 50-point penalty assessed against his team for a rules violation Daytona 500 qualifying and Kahne is 36th in the standings after three races.

That’s nothing like last year, when Kahne came to Atlanta having finished fourth the previous two races and stood third in the standings. He then got his first of a Cup-leading six victories in this race, which he says was an important factor in getting his season cranked up.

“I think that was a huge race for us,” he said. “I started on the pole and wasn’t expecting to win. We just went in thinking, hey, ‘Let’s have a good race.'”

Kahne did, leading 85 laps on his way to the second victory of his Nextel Cup career.

“After that, after we knew how fast we could be on this type of racetrack,” Kahne said of Atlanta, one of the 1.5-mile family of tracks on which Kahne won four times in 2006. He won at Texas and swept two races at Charlotte, adding those wins to ones at Michigan and California in a year where he made the Chase for the Nextel Cup for the first time.

“The rest of the season it was like every time I hit those tracks, we knew we could win and thought we were going to win,” Kahne said. “So I think Atlanta was huge. We kind of figured out how to win early in the year and what our Dodge Charger needed to feel like. I think it helped us throughout the whole season.”

Kahne’s experience at Atlanta in the Chase race in October wasn’t nearly as pleasant. He wrecked late and finished 38th as his Evernham Motorsports team sputtered and fell out of championship contention.

“At this point I could care less what I did last year,” Kahne said. “It’s a new year. Yeah, we won six races, but it’s time to start winning this year. It’s time to run up front this year.”

Kahne said he has had good, fast race cars each week this season but that things just haven’t turned out well the past two weeks.

“I feel like we’re fast,” he said. “I feel like we could have three top 10s. I made a mistake and I had an engine problem. That’s just racing; that’s the way it goes once in a while.”