Matt Kenseth will need a provisional spot to start a race for the second weekend in a row this Sunday, and the competition is hopeful that it's a sign the bad luck which has hit them all year is finally catching up with the points leader.

From the fourth race of the season on, Kenseth has led the points standings thanks to a string of single-digit finishes that vaulted him into a commanding lead. In fact, going into last weekend's race at Talladega Superspeedway, Kenseth had finished all but two laps the entire year.

But the Ford driver got off on the wrong foot at Talladega, having to take a provisional just to start 37th. He ended on a bad note, too, with an engine problem preventing him from completing 30 laps of the race and relegating him to a 33rd-place finish.

"I think it's taken an interesting turn right now," said Jimmie Johnson, who won the pole for this weekend's race at Kansas Speedway, but then wrecked his car Saturday thus forcing him to fall to the back. "The No. 17 is maybe running into a bad luck stretch that the rest of us have been in throughout the year. It's going to be a wild seven races to the end."

It's possible Kenseth and Co. are beginning to feel that vibe in the air. They came out of the gates at Kansas timid and Kenseth said it was a driver error which caused him to wreck his primary car for the race. The team never did get the backup into shape and were forced to take a provisional to start 41st.

"The thing feels pretty good getting down in there and then right after you get to the middle and get back to the gas it just goes real loose on me," Kenseth said. "It came to the green good and felt like it was going to be tight enough in three and four, but I got real loose again up in turn two for some reason.

"We really thrashed today. We weren't really prepared to get the backup out and we had a lot of work to do with the car to get it ready to get out on the track. We didn't get a lot of time with it, but it's a great car. I know it will be good in the race, but we just have to start a ways back."

Jeff Gordon, who has been through several championship battles and won four of them, said the pressure tends to mount as the end of the season draws near and you're in the lead.

"When you're battling for a championship, it's intense," he said. "You feel like every single decision is a major one, every position is a major one, so it is more intense."

But for the most part, Kenseth hasn't had to deal with the intensity that some recent champions have because he's had such a big lead. It's been the competition, actually, which has felt most of the pressure to keep performing while the 17 team cruised.

Still, Dale Earnhardt Jr., one of Kenseth's closest pursuers, was not at all excited to see Kenseth wreck on Friday.

"Well, I don't like to see Matt go sliding into the wall, whether it was at the first of the year or now," Junior said. "It was a fortunate opportunity for us to gain some points on him last week, unfortunate for him and a couple of his teammates. But we're going to need a lot more of the same thing to be able to gain on him in the points, and numerically, we're still in the mix.

"But we don't sit there every week and wait for Matt to blow up or smash into the wall. We run our race and try to beat the guys that we're out there racing with and gain as many points on whoever it may be."

For his part, Kenseth said he isn't feeling the pressure of Kevin Harvick and some of the other title chasers lingering some 350 points back -- a margin which, though daunting, is not insurmountable. Nor does he believe his team has become lax.

And Kenseth certainly doesn't think his team is about to hit the run of bad luck that has visited almost every other contender.

"I'd rather be lucky than good any day," he said. "You always have to have a certain amount of luck go along with your season. Flat tires and things like that you can't control, but the two things we've had go wrong the last two weeks are both things that we can control.

"We had parts break last week that we probably shouldn't have broke and I crashed the car. I shouldn't have crashed today in practice, so those are just human mistakes that really has nothing to do with luck."

Kenseth said he is confident his team will respond and get the car in shape. He's taking a business as usual approach for himself.

"If I was taking it easy I almost wouldn't have wrecked in qualifying, so we're just approaching it like every other weekend," he said.

Rupen Fofaria is a freelance writer living in Chicago and a regular contributor to ESPN.com. He can be reached at rfofaria@espnspecial.com.