Not Tony's kind of smoke: Smoke pours out the back of Tony Stewart's #14 Chevrolet driven during the Southern 500 at Darlington on May 8. For the first time in his career, Stewart has finished outside the top 15 in six straight races.

Nothing in NASCAR is all that predictable, if you give it a little time.

Jimmie Johnson, at least when viewed from the vantage point of recent performances, is no longer an overwhelming favorite for a fifth straight Sprint Cup championship. Oh, pessimistic, short-sighted fans, don't count him out. He may be having a bit of trouble with the spoiler. He's got until the Chase to get that straightened out. Johnson probably is neither as weak as he appears at the moment nor as strong as he seemed a month ago.

For the first time in his distinguished career, Tony Stewart has finished outside the top 15 in six straight races. Come to think of it, until now, Stewart had never failed in a similar fashion more than four times in a row. The latest development is that about half of Stewart's primary sponsorship - the part derived from Old Spice - is, uh, "going away" at season's end.

Six weeks ago, it appeared as if fate had dealt Denny Hamlin a bum hand. Surely, it seemed, he would be hampered by the knee injury he suffered while playing basketball before the season.

Hamlin has won three of the six races since.

At the moment, Kyle Busch, Jeff Gordon, Hamlin, Jeff Burton, Ryan Newman and Juan Pablo Montoya are trending upward. Johnson, Stewart and Kasey Kahne are in decline. Then there are the season's old reliables - Kevin Harvick, Greg Biffle, Kurt Busch, Matt Kenseth, etc. - who have basically been there all year.

Six weeks from now, it's quite possible that the latest trends will have reversed or diminished.

In general, the clearest trend is neither complex nor mathematical: At any given time, almost everyone overreacts.