So did Carl Edwards finally rattle Jimmie Johnson's cage?"Sometimes you can have a little fun playing catch-up," Edwards said happily, after his eighth NASCAR win of the season, chopping Johnson's Sprint Cup tour lead almost in half with two races to go."I was thinking 'Are you sure you want me to start driving slower?' " Edwards said with a laugh after winning a race that suddenly turned into a gas-mileage game in the final 20 minutes. "'We've got a 12-second lead? Are you sure?' I was sure they'd missed seeing a car there somewhere.""Carl has always been hard to slow down," gambling crew chief Bob Osborne said dryly.Johnson and crew chief Chad Knaus were almost perfect through the first seven races of the 10-race Chase. But Round Eight didn't go quite the same way.And the frustration was clear: "We were just off on the first run or two of the race, and got a lap down," Johnson said."Then, with the lack of cautions we could just never get back on the lead lap."I ran around Greg Biffle and Kyle Busch and Clint Bowyer (all running on the lead lap) all day long, and they finished top-five. If things had been different, we could have been up there, too. But we just got behind at the start and could never get back up."I've known all along we were going to have to fight every week for this thing. We had a nice, big points lead (183 at the start of the race against Edwards). And we still have a great points lead (106)."There are two races left, and we'll go to Phoenix, one of our great tracks, and do it again this week."We are definitely disappointed with our performance the first couple of runs. After that, we were comparable, we were fair. We just could never get back on the lead lap ... and that's the way it goes."That a Jack Roush man won here isn't any surprise. His drivers have won seven of the 16 races at Texas Motor Speedway.And it wasn't a surprise that it was Edwards, who won here in the spring, too.Now Edwards heads back to the woods to do some more hunting. "I haven't read a thing in the papers, haven't been thinking a bit about Jimmie. Last week I was out in the tree stand in the woods in Missouri.... You can call it hunting, but I called it watching ... trying to sleep really," Edwards said with a laugh. "And I'm heading back out there this week."If Johnson can come out of Phoenix on Sunday night with a 196-point lead on Edwards and Biffle, he'll clinch the title. To do that, Johnson would have to beat Edwards by 90 points and Biffle by 52 points. And if Johnson can come out of Phoenix with a 162-point lead he would only need to start the Homestead race to clinch. To do that, Johnson would have to beat Edwards at Phoenix by 56 points and Biffle by 18.So if Johnson finishes seventh or better at Phoenix and Homestead, he'll win the championship no matter what Edwards and Biffle do.One of the sharpest incidents of the day was between Juan Pablo Montoya and David Gilliland, and it will likely lead to penalties.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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