Jared Turner: The 2008 Sprint Cup season belonged to Carl Edwards
COMMENTARY
Carl Edwards won’t go down in the record books as the 2008 NASCAR Sprint Cup champion.
But when looking at his performance over the entire season, Edwards was more than championship-caliber.
In fact, when examining his entire body of work – from the first green flag at Daytona to the final checkered flag at Homestead – you can even make the case that Edwards was more deserving of the title than the driver who actually won it: Jimmie Johnson.
Let’s begin with race wins.
Edwards notched a series-high nine triumphs in 36 points-paying races. Johnson earned seven, fewer than the 10th-place points finisher, Kyle Busch.
For the mathematically challenged like me, that means Edwards went to victory lane on average once in every four starts and won exactly a fourth of all points-paying events.
Not bad for a driver who prior to the season had recorded a TOTAL of seven victories spread across three full campaigns in NASCAR’s top series.
Edwards’ dominance in 2008 is not only evident in how many races he won. It’s just as apparent in how he won them.
In each of the victories that Edwards claimed, the Roush Fenway Racing driver led no fewer than 53 laps. Among all of his wins, Edwards spent a total of 961 laps out front.
Unlike Johnson, who visited the winner’s circle only once in the season’s first 19 events, Edwards needed only seven races to go to victory lane three times.
One of his wins during that stretch, at Texas Motor Speedway in April, came without crew chief Bob Osborne, who was serving a six-race suspension for a postrace infraction found on Edwards’ car after his win in the season’s third event at Las Vegas.
That Edwards continued to excel without his pit boss – in the six races without Osborne he posted two top-fives and three top-10s and probably would have won another race had it not been for a blown engine at Atlanta – only underscores how strong he ran throughout 2008.
And that leads to another point. The most races Edwards went the entire season without a top-10 was two – on just two different occasions. Sure, Edwards was dominant. He was also just as much a paragon of consistency this season.
Johnson, on the other hand, struggled mightily at times during the first half of the year as his Chad Knaus-led team tried to get a handle on NASCAR’s new car that was being used at intermediate tracks for the first time.
It’s astonishing to look back now and discover that Johnson recorded only one finish better than 13th in the season’s first five races. Edwards, conversely, came out of the box on fire and only got hotter as the year progressed.
Even in the Chase For The Sprint Cup, when Johnson ultimately ran away with the title, Edwards matched the Hendrick Motorsports driver in wins – with three – and had two more top-five finishes than Johnson.
In fact, the only Chase races in which Edwards finished worse than fourth were Talladega (crash) and Charlotte (ignition-box failure).
And, ultimately, those two races proved be his undoing. If Edwards had placed fifth at Talladega – that’s about where was running at the time of his race-ending crash – he would have earned 79 more points. That would have been more than enough to make up for his 69-point deficit to Johnson in the final standings and still win the championship, even with his problems at Charlotte.
Johnson beat Edwards for the title by placing no worse than 15th in any of the 10 playoff races.
Yet the most telling sign of Edwards’ strength might be the juxtaposition NASCAR’s old points system with the current one.
If this had been 2003 – the year before NASCAR implemented the Chase format that resets the top drivers’ points totals after 26 races – Edwards would have claimed the championship by 16 points over Johnson.
Greg Biffle, who finished third and 217 points behind Johnson under the Chase format, would have been fourth and a distant 489 points back under the old system while Busch would have been third.
Whether the Chase structure actually made this year’s points battle more or less compelling is a story for another day. But Edwards doesn’t need another day to prove that the 2008 season belonged to him.
