Carl Edwards leads a pack of cars during Sunday night’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Photo by Chris Trotman/Getty Images
In his rear-view mirror, Carl Edwards saw his shot at the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship dissolving.
On a restart with 10 laps to go in the Ford EcoBoost 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway, with the title on the line, Joey Logano shot deep to the inside in an attempt to pass Edwards for the lead among the championship contenders. Edwards reacted quickly and decisively, turning his car to the left in an attempt to block Logano.
Logano didn’t lift, and chaos ensued.
Logano shoved Edwards into the inside wall. Edwards’ Toyota bounced across the track, was hit hard by Kasey Kahne and slammed into the outside wall.
Edwards’ championship chances were gone in that fiery instant.
The biggest wreck – at least in its importance – of the NASCAR season ultimately involved nine cars and caused a red flag of 31 minutes and nine seconds as track workers cleared the mess.
Edwards, so close to winning his first Sprint Cup championship after leading 47 laps, refused to take an ambulance ride to the infield care center, instead choosing to make the long, sad walk. Along the way, he stopped at Logano’s pit and talked to Logano crew chief Todd Gordon and other members of the team.
“It didn’t work out,” Edwards said later. “This is life. I just risked too much. I had to push it. I couldn’t go to bed tonight and think that I gave him (Logano) that lane.
“Joey just timed it perfectly. He moved down. I thought I could feel him a little and I just thought – I was probably a little optimistic – I could clear him or force him to lift.”
Edwards said he stopped by the No. 22 pit to tell Gordon the accident was “just racing in my opinion and that’s hard racing, and I wished them luck.”
Edwards said he offered no apologies for the incident. He described the responsibility as “shared” – in other words, two drivers racing for the same space.
Edwards’ smashed car didn’t finish the race. He wound up fourth of the four Championship 4 competitors.
Edwards said the caution that set up the restart and the crash “was very, very frustrating. I felt like that was our race and our championship, but, hey, this is how racing goes.”
The caution was caused by Dylan Lupton’s spin in turn two.
“I don’t know what the caution was for,” Edwards said. “I really hope it was something that we needed to have a caution for because that was really – that was going really well.”
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Logano, Busch Fall Short To ‘Superman’ On Race’s Final Restart
Joey Logano and Kyle Busch raced toward the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship late into the evening Sunday at Homestead-Miami Speedway, and both saw their shots disappear in the closing laps.
Logano took the hardest hit – literally. On a restart with 10 laps to go, Logano chased Carl Edwards, who then was the leader of the Championship 4, with all the finesse that Logano has shown on restarts throughout the season. He shot to the inside with the idea of beating Edwards into the first turn and perhaps taking the lead for the final time. Instead, Edwards dropped low to block. They collided, causing Edwards to crash hard.
On the night’s final restart, Jimmie Johnson drove away from Logano, who never had a chance to duplicate his fierce challenge of Edwards. Johnson raced on to his record-tying seventh title, and Logano was left to try again.
Busch, who was trying to repeat his 2015 championship, was a factor late in the race, but he fell back after the restart that ended in the Logano-Edwards wreck. He was 13th on the night’s final restart after he pitted for tires, and he raced up to sixth but wasn’t a threat to Johnson.
Logano said he wasn’t surprised that the race ended in calamity.
“Any time you put so much on the line and you have a late restart, you know it’s going to get crazy, and then you add two or three of them on top of that, it’s going to get crazier,” he said.
Logano called the incident with Edwards “great racing. I understand why he had to throw the block, and he understands why I had to make the move because that was for the win. That was the only shot that I had. That was for the race win.
“It’s 10 to go. What do you expect? It’s for a championship. I did that move earlier in the race — actually the first start of the race. I knew that was my play. I knew that was what I was going to do as soon as I restarted. We just ran out of real estate to the point, it’s like, OK, we’ve got to do something different.
“You know, that’s just racing, and it hurt both of us — ultimately, Carl a little bit more. But it’s unfortunate.”
Busch said he was too far back on the night’s final restart to be a threat. Pitting for tires put him in a deep hole.
“In order to make up that many spots, we were going to need more than just two laps, but we were going to be able to do it if there were more laps, but that’s the choice we made, and we didn’t feel like we had a shot to win if we didn’t come down [pit road],” he said. “So we were going to just be fighting them off from that point.”
Busch called Johnson’s rally remarkable.
“Johnson was nowhere all night long,” he said. “He couldn’t even keep up with us, really. We were the third-best car, and I never even saw him in my mirror. He just came out of nowhere there at the end and did what he needed to do and was Superman and won the championship, so that’s when it matters.”
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