by Rea White, NASCAR Scene, Special to FOXSports.com

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Pundits pointed to Roush Fenway's Carl Edwards as the driver who could end Hendrick Motorsports' stranglehold on the NASCAR Sprint Cup title and Jimmie Johnson's run at a fourth consecutive championship.

Ordinal out of range

So far, though, it has been Roush Fenway's Matt Kenseth and his new crew chief, Drew Blickensderfer, stealing the show. They've won the opening pair of races for the strongest start to the season that the series has seen since 1997.

Roush Fenway has four drivers in the top nine in the standings — joining leader Kenseth are Greg Biffle in fifth, David Ragan in eighth and Edwards in ninth — and Jamie McMurray has shown strength in races but struggled to finish them. He was caught up in a crash in the Daytona 500 and had a braking issue last weekend at Auto Club Speedway in California.

Although it is far too early to be making sweeping generalizations based on early performances, the fact is that the Roush Fenway contingent looked strong at Auto Club Speedway. This is significant because the 2-mile track marks the first of a series of races on the intermediate tracks that dominate this series.

If the group performs equally well on the 1.5-mile Las Vegas Motor Speedway this weekend, it's a sure sign that they've done their offseason homework and should be a force to be reckoned with throughout the season.

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Team co-owner Jack Roush said that prior to Sunday's race, all eyes were once more on the Hendrick cars. But he felt as if his teams would be strong as well. Johnson paced prerace practices, and then Hendrick's Jeff Gordon was obviously a factor in the race itself.

Biffle was in contention for the win before he ran over an air hose during a pit stop; he still finished fourth. Edwards was "a little disappointed," Roush said, "and David Ragan and (crew chief) Jimmy Fennig will be a little disappointed. (Crew chief) Donnie Wingo and Jamie McMurray had a brake problem; that was unfortunate. All of our Fords ran well."

Roush says that part of the reason for the team's success is the lack of preseason testing.

NASCAR banned all testing at tracks that host Sprint Cup, Nationwide, Truck, East and West series races this season. That meant that when teams headed to Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, Calif., last weekend, they were seeing the track for the first time in months. The same is true this week of Las Vegas, a track teams visit only once a season.

Roush says that the testing restriction has allowed teams to play to their strengths, especially those that have excelled on these intermediate tracks in the past.

"As I look at the no-testing program that we're on and not being able to come to this race track and test, it's clearly played to the strength to the people that have had success. It's played to Hendrick's program, it's played to (Joe) Gibbs (Racing's) program, with the way that Kyle Busch had run, and it played to ours as well," he says.

As he looks down the road, the usually circumspect Roush takes a more positive approach. Ahead on the schedule are more of these types of tracks, with the fast 1.5-mile outings at Las Vegas and Atlanta Motor Speedway and then the short tracks at Bristol and Martinsville.

His teams have performed well at all of these races, especially those on the intermediate tracks. Last season, Edwards won at Vegas, with Biffle finishing third and Ragan seventh. At Atlanta in the spring, Biffle was fourth, Kenseth eighth, and when they returned in the fall Edwards won with Kenseth fourth, McMurray seventh, Ragan eighth and Biffle 10th.

As he looks at his teams' early runs, Roush credits Kenseth's success to the driver and the "Drew factor" — and sees much promise with the rest of his group as well.

"With the way that Carl had run and with the way Jamie has been running and the way Greg has run and the way David has been coming, certainly there is an expectation on my part we were going to be faster in these races until we get to Martinsville," he said. "And the guys snuck off to the Little Rock (half-mile track) there at Rockingham (N.C.) race track, and that is one of the places where you can go and test a little bit, and we think we even got something for Martinsville that we haven't had before.

"So I'm real optimistic about what's going to happen in the first handful of races. The idea of winning Daytona under rain circumstance was a surprise. It caught me totally off guard."

Can this surge continue?

For his part, Kenseth obviously hopes so. No driver has ever won the opening three races of the season, but Kenseth feels optimistic about his chances. Normally viewed as somewhat more pessimistic and hesitant to make predictions about the future, the 2003 Cup champion clearly has high expectations for the coming week.

Both he and Roush seem to have found renewed confidence in their group based on the strong start to the year.

"I've thought ahead," Kenseth says. "I feel real good about Vegas. ... It feels pretty unbelievable to win the first two races — especially Daytona, to be able to come out of the box and run competitively here. ... I don't know why, I was more confident coming into this year than I have been in a (lot of) seasons.

"I just feel great about the group we have assembled. Everybody's having fun, everybody's loose, and everybody's performing at the same time. And I think Drew has given the leadership and the start that they kind of need, and (team engineer) Chip (Bolin) has all the extra time to work on the cars and keep up with the engineering and the date and sift through all that stuff, and they've been able to work great together so far."

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Rea White is a writer for NASCAR Scene, which is published weekly, 50 weeks per year. Visit www.scenedaily.com for more information.