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CUP: Countdown To Daytona - Roush Fenway

It’s one thing for the media to predict that Carl Edwards will be the 2009 Sprint Cup champion... It’s another thing entirely for he and his team to make it a reality...

Tom Jensen | Posted February 05, 2009 Daytona Beach, FL

Carl Edwards finished the 2008 NASCAR Cup season by winning three of the final four races and a series-high nine overall to finish second overall behind Jimmie Johnson. (Jason Smith/Getty Images Photo)

Editor’s note: This is the ninth of 10 stories in SPEEDtv.com’s “Countdown To Daytona” preview of the upcoming 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season.

Carl Edwards finished the 2008 NASCAR Sprint Cup season on a tremendous roll, winning three of the final four races and a series-high nine overall to finish second behind Jimmie Johnson in the championship race.

The breakthrough performance of Edwards, crew chief Bob Osborne, and the rest of the No. 99 Roush Fenway Racing Ford Fusion team has made the Missouri native the favorite to finally wrest the Cup crown away from Johnson for the first time since 2005.

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A pre-season NASCARmedia.com poll of reporters who cover NASCAR racing saw Edwards earn 70 first-place votes to Johnson’s 37, making him a nearly 2-1 favorite. “It is an unreal compliment for 70 (media members) to think that I will win it all,” Edwards said. “It's just great. What Jimmie has done is spectacular. For the media to say they think that I might be able to stop that is pretty neat.”

Of course, it’s one thing for the media to predict that Edwards will be the 2009 Sprint Cup champion. It’s another thing entirely for he and his team to make it a reality. Edwards came close last year, besting Johnson in race victories, as well as top-five and top-10 finishes. But by his own admission, Edwards said his team needs to be nearly flawless during the Chase for the Sprint Cup, as Johnson seemingly is every year.

“I think for 2009, the thing that I have to be better at — and what we all need to be better at — is what Jimmie Johnson does so well. Never being the reason you lose a position. No matter what, if they have a terrible car they always make the best of it. I think that's the thing that won them this championship.”

Team co-owner Jack Roush agreed wholeheartedly with that assessment. “Well, if you look at last year in the Chase, we had the wreck at Talladega and we had ignition problems at Charlotte, both of which were unpredictable and therefore unavoidable,” said Roush. “If one of those would have occurred and not both, he would have got more points in the final 10 races than the 48 car (Johnson) did, so we don’t need to close the gap on technology. We don’t need to correct some oversight of judgment. We don’t need to make our manufacturing or our cars faster in terms of the speed they’ve got in them, all we have to do is miss the wreck and not have the bad luck of having infant mortality with a component around the engine and we’ll be just fine.”

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Tom Jensen

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