Carl Edwards finds another runner-up finish at Kansas 'pretty painful'
As Sunday's Hollywood Casino 400 moved into its latter stages, it looked as if Carl Edwards was poised to finally win a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at Kansas Speedway, which the native of Columbia, Missouri, has long referred to as his home track.
It didn't happen when Kevin Harvick, starting on the inside of the front row alongside then-leader Edwards on the outside, surged to the lead on a restart with 30 laps remaining in the 267-lap race. Harvick went on to win and Edwards was forced to settle for second.
He blamed no one but himself for getting beat by Harvick on what turned out to be the final restart.
"I felt like we had the fastest car at the end. That's what's frustrating, you should win with the fastest car, especially when you start on the front row," said Edwards, driver of the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota. "I take responsibility for that. I could have done something different on that restart, possibly hung on, and I wouldn't have been in that position."
Edwards was still smiling, however, as he looked for and found a proverbial silver lining in the runner-up finish that tied the best of his career at Kansas. He also finished second in 2008.
"Man, I raced as hard as I could all day," Edwards said. "You know, we didn't make hardly any mistakes. So we can keep our heads up. Like (crew chief) Dave (Rogers) said after the race, that's the most speed we've had at a mile‑and‑a‑half (track) in a long time. That bodes well for the rest of the year, for (1.5-mile tracks at) Texas and Homestead."
The finish also was Edwards' seventh top-five and 13th top-10 finish in 19 career starts at Kansas.
The 61 laps led also were the most Edwards has ever been out front at the track, as well as the most he's led since winning his only two races of this season back-to-back at Bristol and Richmond in the spring, more than six months ago.
"That's the good part. We ran well," Edwards said. "That was really fun, getting to race up front. It's really tough for me to finish second here. It's happened twice. Both of them were pretty painful.
"The bright side is that, yes, we raced up front. We got a lot of support from a lot of people here. Hopefully they enjoyed that part of it."
He still had trouble shaking off the final restart, knowing that a victory would have meant automatic advancement into the next round of the Chase for the Sprint Cup playoffs. He remains a seemingly solid fourth, 24 points ahead of the Chase cutoff for the Round of 8, heading into next week's elimination race at Talladega Superspeedway. The current Chase field will be trimmed from 12 drivers to eight after that race.
"That last restart, Kevin (Harvick) and Jimmie (Johnson) just lined up at the bottom and they just got far enough ahead, I couldn't hang on the outside," Edwards said. "Then I ended up having to race Kyle (Busch) really hard there for a few laps. It let Kevin get out ahead.
"But, man, we'll just move forward. A day or two will pass, maybe the sting will wear off and I'll be more excited about the points situation going into Talladega, because that's the bright side. We've got two decent races under our belts to go to Talladega with (after finishing 12th at Charlotte in the first race of the current Chase round)."
Edwards said he truly believes in his team's chances to win his first Sprint Cup title, which will come only if he can be one of the final four drivers left standing in the Chase by the winner-take-all season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway on Nov. 19.
"We really believe if we can get to Homestead, we can win this championship," Edwards said.
