Atlanta Motor Speedway a welcome sight for Roush Fenway Racing's Carl Edwards
Carl Edwards isn’t off to the kind of start this season that he or many others were expecting, but it’d be misguided not to count him among those who’ll likely contend for the win in Sunday’s Kobalt Tools 500 Sprint Cup race at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
Just ask three-time defending series champion Jimmie Johnson.
“I look at Atlanta and the 99 car [of Edwards] and how strong they’ve been there at that track and would probably put him as the top seed going into the race,” said Johnson, who swept both 2007 races at the track in his Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet. “I’d kind of look at Carl. It’d be fun to put the pressure on him this weekend and let him be the favorite for that. Those guys have been really, really strong there.”
Edwards went to victory lane at the 1.54-mile suburban Atlanta trioval last fall and appeared headed for there last spring until a blown engine ended his day 51 laps from the finish. In total, he has three wins, five top-fives and seven top-10 finishes in nine starts at the facility.
“Regardless of the challenges at Atlanta, for some reason we’ve had a lot of success there,” the driver of Roush Fenway Racing’s No. 99 Ford said. “I don’t know why exactly. I just really like the race track. It drives like a half-mile dirt track. The way you drive around it feels a lot like the tracks I grew up racing on. Even though it’s completely different, it still gives me that same sense of the momentum, so I really like that.
“Between the surface, tires and car moving around, you have to really drive the car, and I enjoy that. That’s probably why I run well there. All those things, plus I love going there; it’s a fun place to race.”
Atlanta is also the site of the driver’s first career Cup triumph, in the spring of 2005. In that race, he edged Johnson by .028 second in a drag race to the finish line.
“The moment they threw the checkered flag and I realized I had just won a NASCAR Sprint Cup race it sort of changed my whole outlook on my career,” said Edwards, who has since hoisted the winner’s trophy 15 more times in NASCAR’s top series. “I couldn’t believe that it happened. It was just a really, really satisfying moment. It really felt good. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get another win there on Sunday.”
Despite being ninth in the standings, Edwards has been notably unspectacular in the season’s first three events, including those at Auto Club Speedway in California and Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where he was defending race champion.
He finished seventh at the 2-mile Fontana, Calif., track after leading just one lap and saw his Vegas run ruined by a blown engine.
Edwards and his team had rallied to fifth after an unscheduled pit stop for a loose lugnut when the engine let to go at the white flag. He limped home 17th at the 1.5-mile trioval.
That seven of Edwards series' high nine victories in 2008 came at 1.5- and 2-mile tracks makes his mediocre performances the past two weeks more surprising.
“Last weekend we struggled some in Vegas,” crew chief Bob Osborne said. “We had a good car, but mistakes on pit road kept setting us back. Then, just when had overcome all the miscues and looked to be on our way to a solid finish, our engine broke. We’ve gone back to the shop and worked through all the kinks with our RPM and tire issues, so I’m not expecting to have that problem this weekend.”
