Carl Edwards came as close as it was possible to winning the 2011
NASCAR Sprint Cup championship as it's possible to get, while still losing out. Tied on points with Tony Stewart, he lost out on the number of wins overall in the year. 2012 proved a year to forget and he went into the second race of 2013 with a growing winless streak that he was desperately keen to break...
Q:
We welcome a very excited Carl Edwards, winner of today's Subway Fresh Fit 500 and driver of the #99 subway Ford. This is Carl's 20th victory in 303
NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races. This race ends a 70-race winless streak, the longest of his career. Obviously a big day for you. Just talk a little bit about it.
Carl Edwards:
Yeah, very excited. After I left here this afternoon I told Randy, I'm going to quit being so nice when people ask about this losing streak because it is very frustrating. Not that it makes me mad that you ask, it makes me mad to not be winning races. I cannot say enough about Jack Roush and all the folks he has there at Roush Fenway Racing. Bob Osborne and I won 18 or 19 races together, and when Bob couldn't crew chief anymore Jack put Chad Norris behind me. Chad picked up as much slack as my man could being put into the fire there last year, and then when the season ended Jack put Jimmy Fennig behind me and let him build a team around this #99. And it just seems like Jack and Robby and everyone just keep pushing this #99 team forward and it means the world to me. To be in victory lane this early in the season, to have a car like we had today is really, really great. This win feels as good or better than any win I've ever had, so very excited about it.
Q:
Carl, Denny was in here a little while ago, he says, Carl Edwards is relevant again. Did you feel irrelevant and do you feel relevant now?
Carl Edwards:
Yeah, I appreciate him bringing that up. At least he didn't talk about my irrelevancy when I was irrelevant. But it is hard to explain. A lot of people that have been in sports and definitely Jack and Jimmy understand this, but when you're struggling it seems like time slows down, you're working harder, you're trying more, you're questioning yourself more. Kyle Petty earlier, we were being interviewed, he's like, where were you last year? I was there. That's one of the longest years of my life to work that hard and not get the victory. I'm very, very happy to be back in the mix here. A victory is huge and for so many reasons. Last year we didn't make the Chase. For me to sit home while everybody was at the Chase stuff and at Vegas, that was a little bit of a shock to me. I did not like that at all.
To get a victory helps us be in a better position for the Chase. It just feels good to win, and I'm just very glad to be here. So yeah, I hope Denny is right. I hope we're relevant or more than relevant all year. I hope we dominate this thing.
Q:
Not to sound like a marketing tool, but we've heard from the people up in Dearborn and you have a new teammate now and he just happens to be the defending champion. How much did that mean to have the two Fords get together at the end and really help push you to the win?
Carl Edwards:
That was huge, and we all know that Brad and I have not had the best history. It was pretty bad at one point. But we've worked a lot through Ford in the off-season, we did our media day, Brad and I talked a little bit about how we planned on helping one another this season, and that I think was an amazing example of what we can do together to make sure Fords get to victory lane. We talked a lot about it at Daytona. We weren't able to put something together. But hopefully this season the things that Ford has been talk about, one Ford - all the way from Jim Farley - Jim Farley and Edsel Ford came to that media day at the Hall of Fame just to sit us in a room and say, hey look, we want to win as a team. We want to do what we can do to help one another and that was very cool today of Brad to push us. I knew if we made it to Turn 1 first, we were going to win that race. He could've gone three wide, he could have made that a heck of a lot harder, and that was pretty big.
Q:
What was going through your mind when the caution came out there? Did you think that you still had a chance to win?
Carl Edwards:
Well, yeah, I always think I have a chance. To be honest, the first thing that came to my mind is now if we win it, we've really earned it because we did have a great pit crew and great pit strategy today. We got out front, and I felt pretty good with two or three laps to go that we were going to walk away with that race, and when the caution came out I said, okay, now we're going to have to earn it. It made me real - not real nervous, but it made me really buckle down and work hard. A heart rate monitor on me would have been pretty interesting probably at that point because I knew it was going to be tough.
Q: