Before the 2009 Sprint Cup season began, Carl Edwards was considered the prohibitive favorite for the championship.
No one expected the driver, who won a season and career-high nine races and finished second in the 2008 point standings, to be 0 for 20 this year — particularly, Edwards.
Keeping track
| Starts | Wins | Top fives | Top 10s | Laps led |
| 20 | 0 | 5 | 9 | 158 |
Edwards is not shocked. He understands how things can go. There was the miscue in the pits at Martinsville followed by a cut tire. Edwards was leading the final lap at Talladega when he was dumped just short of the finish line. He also "could've won Texas, should've won Pocono" if the racing gods had shined on the No. 99 Ford those days.
"If luck would have been average, we'd have one or two wins right now," Edwards said. "I think we've had just a little bit of bad luck. So I'm not surprised by it.
"If we don't win one within the next 10 or 15 races, then that would be a little bit disappointing. But I feel we will still win one or two races before the season is over. I still feel our performance is good enough to win a few races."
Certainly, rolling back into Pocono, where Edwards is the defending winner of the Pennsylvania 500, would seem like the perfect track to turn his season around. With qualifying rained out, Edwards benefits from starting fifth on Sunday. Entering Pocono, where he's won two races and posted four top fives and five top-10 finishes in nine starts, Edwards is confident he can use the 2.5-miler to jumpstart his championship run, especially since his performance of the season came in June at Pocono when he led 103 laps before finishing second to Tony Stewart.
"I'm not willing to write anything off," Edwards said. "I still feel like we can win this championship. I feel very strongly that we can win it, so I guess we'll just have to keep our heads up and keep moving forward and keep working on it."
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But Edwards will have find a way to outfox the Hendrick juggernaut — which has only been strengthened by the addition of Mark Martin — as well as the Stewart-Ryan Newman partnership at Stewart-Haas Racing.
For the Roush Fenway Racing teams, finishing behind the Hendrick-powered cars has become commonplace this season.
Since Matt Kenseth won the first two races of the year, RFR has struggled to keep up with the Hendrick engines and cars as it has in the past. With the exception of Chicagoland Speedway, where Edwards was the only Ford driver to finish on the lead lap, the evidence is clearest in the win column. Certainly, the testing ban has hurt Roush Fenway Racing dramatically. Although the R&D team still tests, Roush hasn't seem to be able to transfer that data and simulation to the racetrack with the same success as Hendrick.
"What we have to do is just run stuff we know we can compete with," Edwards said. "Not get too far out there. We can't run stuff that's so far out there ... . You look at Greg (Biffle) and Matt (Kenseth) and those guys. We have to be careful not to have another race like (Chicago). We have to do what we can do and not slide any further.
"The competition is so close right now — and it's closer than it was last year. Even though we're not as competitive as we were, we're not that far off. The important thing is not to panic. If you get off just a little all of a sudden you're a 10th-place car. If you screw up a lap or two, you're 15th. It takes a whole race just to get there."
Edwards isn't necessarily in need of a transfusion, considering the No. 99 Roush Fenway Racing is currently fifth in the point standings and the top Ford team in points. However, the chasm between Edwards and points leader Stewart is a whopping 498 points. The distance between Edwards and 13th-place David Reutimann is only 195 points.
For Edwards, the point differential to the cellar is cause for concern with just six races remaining before the title-deciding Chase for the Sprint Cup. As the points stand entering Pocono, Edwards would be shuffled back to eighth place without any wins to his credit.
"We're not as far off as it looks, but regardless, we need to be better," Edwards said. "We can't make any mistakes. I'd give anything for 100 more points right now because it's not comfortable to know that in one or two races you can be 13th."
