NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
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CUP: Sparkling Consistency Keeps Edwards On Top
Tony Stewart has four Chase victories, but Carl Edwards carries lead to Phoenix…
Mike Hembree  |  Posted November 07, 2011   Charlotte, NC
No. 99 Ford driver Carl Edwards won the pole for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Ford 400 At Homestead-Miami Speedway. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
Tony Stewart has won four of the eight races in the Chase for the Sprint Cup.

No other Chaser has won more than one.

Carl Edwards has not won a race in the Chase. In fact, he hasn’t won a race since March.

Yet, with two races remaining in the season, Edwards has a three-point lead over Stewart in pursuit of the series championship.

These numbers are confusing only for the NASCAR newcomer.

For virtually as long as there has been a NASCAR, relentless consistency – Edwards’ strong suit this year (and this Chase) – has trumped occasional victories mixed with mediocre-to-bad finishes.

Even with dramatic point-system changes made in the last off-season, NASCAR still avoids loading riches on the victorious at the expense of others. There were a few more rewards for race wins this season, but, generally, a plateful of top fives is better than a few victories and a nest of also-rans.

Despite Stewart’s extraordinary surge in the Chase, Edwards easily outruns him – 5.62 to 7.37 – in average race finish during the playoffs. Although Edwards has no Chase victories – in fact, Sunday’s finish was his first second-place run in the playoffs, he has no finish worse than 11th. Stewart had a 25th at Denver when the team was way off its mark, and he was 15th the following week at Kansas.

Otherwise, Stewart’s Chase sheet has four wins, a seventh and an eighth, but those two double-digit runs pulled down his average finish.

“We had to win four races to make up that deficit of what we got ourselves into at the Dover race,” Stewart said after Sunday’s win.

“I'm going to be real disappointed if people are trying to make a story out of a guy that's got four wins [who] isn't leading the points. It's about 10 weeks. You’ve got to be good for 10 weeks. You can't just sit there and say, ‘You can throw it all away to try to win a race and get there.’

“We have had to have those four wins to make up for Kansas that we missed an opportunity there and Dover that we just were bad. We've had to rebound from that. The good news is our four wins have carried us within three points of the lead. So I'm proud that we've been able to fight our way back up to it.”

Over the course of the season, Edwards’ edge in consistent high finishes becomes even more evident. He has 17 top fives to Stewart’s seven and 24 top 10s to Stewart’s 17.

In fact, nine of the 12 Chase drivers have more top-five finishes this season than Stewart.

In the final analysis, however, the biggest number of all is 3 – the number of points separating Edwards from Stewart. Stewart can wipe out that slim deficit, he said, by staying the course.

“When you got two weekends in a row like we've had, we don't have to do anything different,” he said. “We just got to keep doing what we've been doing, and that's worrying about our own race car. Everybody else has to worry about what we're doing, why and how.”

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 29 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.
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