Sunoco Pit Move: Dover

DOVER, Del. -- Carl Edwards avoided trouble on Sunday at Dover like a good running back dodges would-be tacklers.

There were at least five instances where Edwards could have been anywhere but Victory Lane at the end of 400 crazy laps at the Monster Mile in the Dodge Dealers 400.

1. He nearly got sandwiched on pit road early in the race.
2. He had a throttle linkage issue that buried him deep in the running order.
3. He somehow kept from getting collected in the series of accidents that seemingly wiped out the rest of the contenders.
4. He barely avoided a pit-road penalty when he swerved to miss the commitment cone when the pits were closed.
5. He held off cars with fresher tires during the final green-flag run.

"It's huge. This place has great potential for disaster," Edwards said of his victory. "I think everybody saw those wrecks. I saw the replay on the big screen of that one, into Turn 3, that's huge."

Edwards was almost a victim of a huge wreck right off the bat, courtesy of Dover's narrow pit lane. On Lap 55, following a debris caution, Edwards exited his stall and had to take evasive action to miss Jeff Gordon to his left and John Andretti to his right. That incident cost him several positions, as Edwards was sixth coming in and 12th going out.

Then mechanical woes nearly derailed his day when running a strong second to Matt Kenseth, he began to lose positions on the track. It turned out to be a sticking throttle linkage. Luckily, a competition caution on Lap 147 allowed crew chief Bob Osborne and the crew to pop the hood and make some quick repairs.

Still, Edwards was 25th when the green came back out.

"When we came in and fixed the throttle and went back to 24th, or whatever position we went back to, they threw the green flag, I was running, I think, 38th or 40th or something on the racetrack, and it looked like a mess," he said. "It looked like Russian roulette to me, for a while. I do feel great that we got out of here. There's just so many things that could happen. There's no room for error at this racetrack."

By Lap 200, Edwards was back up to 13th, broke back into the top 10 when he avoided the Denny Hamlin-Kyle Petty crash and showed his car's real strength during the one long green-flag run, passing Kenseth for the lead on Lap 267.

"We made a decision there [on the] second-to-last stop to stay out," Osborne said. "A lot of the guys chose to come in and that kind of put a big scare into us, having to stop under a green flag, and a lot of the guys got to run 15 to 20 laps longer, so that was pretty shaky for us, I felt."

Edwards swapped the lead with Kenseth again with 80 laps remaining but nearly gave the victory away when the caution flag came out on Lap 355 for debris. His spotter reportedly told him the pits were open, but as he came to the pit entrance, he suddenly realized they weren't and swerved back onto the track, just in time.

Then Edwards and Osborne had to bite their fingernails as several other contenders were able to duck onto pit road for new tires during a series of cautions.

"We got the cautions to go our way, and at the end of the race, I had no intentions of asking Carl to pit," Osborne said. "Even though we had conversations about it, I was trying to mislead there. I think Carl did a great job and it was just a little tense at the end with all the red flags and cautions."

And a little advice came in handy.

"My dad told me from Day 1, 'There's a thousand ways to lose a race, and you can only control some of them,' so you just have to control what you can control," Edwards said. "You can't lose because of one of those things you could control, and if one of those things happen, you just have to accept that -- just realizing your performance is all you can do."