Friday, Sep. 25, 2009

What happened to Carl Edwards this season?

Driver experiences performance drop-off compared to last year but remains confident

There was no bigger fan of the Chase for the Sprint Cup format than Carl Edwards this season.

Why?

Because the "reset" of series points that comes with the start of the chase erased the enormous deficit Edwards faced compared to then-series leader Tony Stewart and reinvigorated Edwards' title hopes.

With nine of the 10 races left to determine the champion, Edwards is 11th in points, but 113 points behind leader Mark Martin -- still a workable margin.

Yet that's a far cry from last season, when Edwards entered the chase with six wins and ended the year with a series-high nine victories and lost the championship to Jimmie Johnson by 69 points.

"I feel like last year's experience in the chase was really valuable to me," said Edwards, as he prepares for Sunday's AAA 400 at Dover (Del.) International Speedway.

"To be able to stay within reach of Jimmie until the last part, the final race, the last lap -- I think that experience and going through those emotions, battling through some adversity through a few bad races that we had, I think that's good. I think it helps me."

The more important question is why Roush Fenway Racing, and in particular Edwards, had such a drop-off in performance this season?

No one has been able to touch on a single answer. Speed has been mentioned, the geometry of the cars Roush prepares. The organization has worked on the problem all season.

Last season, three Roush drivers -- Edwards, Matt Kenseth and Greg Biffle -- made the chase and Edwards and Biffle both won two or more races.

This year, Kenseth started the year with a pair of wins at Daytona and California but failed to make the chase. And Edwards and Biffle did make the chase field, but neither has won a race.

Biffle struggled just to make the chase field and Edwards had a sub-par performance in last weekend's chase opener at New Hampshire.

Since the chase format's inception in 2004, only one driver (Johnson in 2006) has won the championship that finished lower than sixth in the first of the 10 races. Edwards was 17th last weekend and Biffle finished ninth.

Edwards remains undaunted.

"I define my successes on my effort that I put out, personally how I perform and how our guys perform, and if that yields a championship, that's great," he said. "And if it doesn't, we've still got to keep our heads up.

"I'm going into this thing thinking we can win it. I know we haven't performed to that level lately, but we're going to throw everything we've got at it."