LOUDON -- FRANK STODDARD, the race car owner who grew up in New Hampshire's North Country, stood outside his team's No. 32 Fast Lane Racing hauler on Saturday afternoon and discussed the battle that is taking place for coveted spots in the Chase to the Sprint Cup championship.

“My sleeper to win it, and he's a huge sleeper and people aren't seeing it, is Kasey Kahne,” Stoddard said. “If he makes the Chase, and I think he will make it, that team can put together a 10-race streak. They've been pretty fast and he's getting more and more comfortable with the team.”

Twenty-four hours later, Kahne went out and, for the moment at least, backed up the words of Stoddard, who also likes Jeff Gordon as a darkhorse but felt winning at New Hampshire was a necessity for him.

There are no guarantees and there are seven more races before the dozen-driver field for the Chase is set after the Richmond race on Sept. 8, but Kahne set himself up nicely for the stretch run.

He caught a break on Sunday when Denny Hamlin, who had been dominant in the race, and his crew chief, Darian Grubb, had a misunderstanding on the last pit stop of the afternoon. Hamlin took four tires instead of two on that last stop and lost valuable track position in the process.

Their loss was Kahne's gain and he proceeded to take full advantage and managed to hold off a hard-charging Hamlin at the end.

Kahne celebrated in Victory Lane and received a giant lobster from young Ella Gappens — the daughter of NHMS executive vice president and GM Jerry Gappens — as partial payment for his triumph, capping another successful Cup weekend at the track.

“I'm sitting here writing a thank you note to send to the fans,” Jerry Gappens said on Monday morning. “I'm really pleased. I thought it was a great weekend for everyone. We had a popular winner in Kasey Kahne and there was good story line with Hamlin charging. And from our standpoint, logistically, everything went well. With the hot weather, you always worry about the temperatures, but there seemed to be no major problems.”

Gappens and Co. tweaked the on-track schedule for the weekend. The first racing was on Saturday and included the Whelen Modified Tour and F.W. Webb Nationwide race, as usual, and was capped off by a first-time Global RallyCross event.

Travis Pastrana, star of extreme sports and trying to make his mark in NASCAR, crashed out of the Nationwide race and then came back to win a wild RallyCross that included a jump with a 48-foot gap in it, ramps and other obstacles.

Both the Nationwide and RallyCross events were live on ESPN.

Gappens estimated a crowd of 44-45,000 was on hand on Saturday afternoon and that 10,000 stuck around, or came in, for the RallyCross.

By Monday morning, Gappens had already received suggestions from fans that the rally cars be brought back for the September Cup weekend. That won't happen, he said, but he does hope to have them back next year.

“It is a very labor intensive event to put on when you have to put the track up and take it down several times,” Gappens said. “It was very hard on our operations people. We'll definitely take a good look at it. There were some very positive aspects that we knew about it going in, and it exceeded expectations.”

The K&N Pro Series East, long a fixture at NHMS events, was not part of the weekend, but will return in September.

Gappens said he and his team will meet at 8 this morning for a quick debriefing of the weekend.

“We normally wait about two weeks to get letters in from fans and collect feedback before we get into a deeper debriefing to help prepare for September,” he said.

Last year, an IndyCar race in August filled the time between the July and September race, but it did not do well attendance-wise and Gappens chose not to bring the event back.

He said the track came up about 3,400 fans short of a sellout on Sunday.

“NASCAR estimated it at 95,000 and we did have some no-shows, that I guess were heat related,” Gappens said. “We feel if we get under 4,000 tickets left, we've done a good job, especially in this economy.”

NHMS also was within that 4,000 number for the September race last year and ticket sales have been running about even with that again, he said.

The Cup series takes a week off now and when it returns for a race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway on July 29, it goes nonstop from there to the season finale on Nov. 18 at Homestead-Miami.

The Sylvania 300 here on Sept. 23 is the second race of the 10 races in the Chase.

Allen Lessels covers motor sports for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Sunday News. He may be reached at alessels@unionleader.com.