Carl Edwards uses late pit stop, downforce to win Darlington
DARLINGTON, S.C.—Brad Keselowski was cruising late in the Bojangles Southern 500, and Carl Edwards had fought his way from two laps down into second place.
“Let’s get him,” Edwards said … and then he did.
In the longest race of the season, four hours and 29 minutes, longer even than the Coca-Cola 600, Edwards used a late pit stop and mastery of a new low-downforce aero package to hold off Keselowski and Denny Hamlin and win the famous Southern 500.
“My pit crew ought to be sitting up here doing interviews,” Edwards said afterward. “They won that race for us, to come in third and go out leading the race.”
NASCAR billed this weekend, the first Darlington Labor Day race in more than a decade, as a “throwback,” and 28 of the 43 teams on the track obliged by bringing retro paint schemes to the track. NBC used old-school graphics, on-camera crew wore hilariously outdated clothes, and legendary announcers Ken Squier, Ned Jarrett and Dale Jarrett took a memorable turn calling the race. The one throwback aspect that this race didn’t feature is the one that belongs in the history books: the uncompetitive, winner-by-five-laps races of yore.
This year’s model was always competitive and frequently fascinating, with drivers trying to master the new aero package in real time. Some, like Edwards and Brad Keselowski, learned quickly; others ended up spinning time and again. The race ended up with 18 cautions, setting a new Darlington record and coming within sight of the all-time record of 22.
As the race wound down, the leaders included Edwards, Keselowski, Joey Logano, Denny Hamlin and Kevin Harvick, five drivers who have each had memorable run-ins with the others over the years, plus Kyle and Kurt Busch, who are always one bent fender away from starting fights of their own. The race could end with a runaway victory or it could end in multiple fistfights, and no one would have been surprised either way.
Keselowski controlled the tempo of the race throughout, leading a race-high 196 laps. (Hamlin, the next-closest lap leader, notched only 57.) But the final caution proved to be his undoing; all the leaders took tires, and Edwards beat Keselowski to the line by a hairsbreadth.
The win marked the culmination of a night of exceptional resilience for Edwards. He suffered a flat tire on lap 90 and went two laps down, but fought his way back to put himself in position to challenge Keselowski’s late dominance. Had the race stayed green throughout, it’s doubtfui Edwards or anyone else would have caught Keselowski, but Jeb Burton’s spin with 11 laps remaining opened the door for Edwards.
The new package meant drivers had to work much harder on the track, a challenging state that worked out just fine for some but not so well for others. “The cars, just five or six years ago when I entered Sprint Cup, were extremely difficult to drive, much like a stick shift when you’re first learning how to drive,” Keselowski said. “And then they’ve gotten really easy to drive over the last four or five years, to the point where we’re all kind of looking around at each other as drivers going, wait a minute here, this isn’t good, it shouldn’t be this easy to drive these. So we asked NASCAR to, hey, make these cars harder to drive, give us our—metaphorically speaking—stick shift back, and they did, and I think somebody thought they’d be really funny and pick Darlington as the track to do that, which would be like if you picked the mountains of Virginia to give somebody a stick shift back.”
The series now shifts to Richmond, the final race of NASCAR’s regular season. While the Chase field is almost completely set, there’s always the outside chance that a first-time winner could sneak in and bounce one of the low-points drivers like Clint Bowyer. Conventional wisdom has held that Kyle Busch, Hamlin, Harvick, and Logano have been the strongest drivers headed into the Chase, but Keselowski and Edwards have forced themselves into the conversation as well. No matter how the Chase ends for Edwards, he’s knocked a NASCAR victory off his bucket list.
“I hope I never forget those last 25 laps,” Edwards said. “That was fun.”
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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at [email protected] or find him on Twitter.
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