Kickin' it with Carl

Carl Edwards roared back from 29th to take the lead at Atlanta, before finishing third. Getty Images/Jerry Markland

NASCAR's Carl Edwards has agreed to do a Q&A series with SI.com this season. This week, we talked to him in between filming a commercial for Claritin's Clear To Drive program. He gave his take on his first four races, some advice on how to get started in racing, and let us in on some secrets to getting around Bristol.

Q: Let's talk about your last race at Atlanta. How did you feel about your third place finish? You came all the way from 29th, but it ended with you dropping from first to third on that final green-white-checkered restart.

A: Atlanta is probably one of my most successful tracks. As a driver and as a team, every time we go there, we feel like we can win. So in that respect, third was a little bit frustrating. But overall, for the points situation, the time of the season we're at, and the way our pit stops worked out, it was a great finish. I mean, that's probably the best we could have hoped for. Kurt Busch was extremely fast all day -- even if everything went perfectly it would have been a heck of a battle with him. So third was acceptable.

Q: Set us up for the final two laps of that race. You finally got out front in your final pit stop ... but you know Kurt Busch is so much faster (he led 234 of 325 laps), and he's sitting there ready to pounce on that restart. How do you hold him off knowing the speed difference you've had all race?

A: Well, the reason we were leading is because we took two tires [everyone else took four] -- so we still had 30 or 40 laps on the left sides. In a way, I was kind of a sitting duck for that finish. But I knew that if on the restart there was a caution or something, and the caution came out before we got through the first corner, I thought, Hey, I might have a chance to win this thing. I'd seen that happen with Jimmie Johnson a year and a half ago. And sometimes you get out front and get some good air. But I knew as soon as Busch got to the outside of me, he was going to pass by and just check out.

Still, I was happy that we put ourselves in a position where we could win. That was the best thing we could do. If I had it to do all over again, I might drive a little bit differently -- but I don't know if it would have helped. Wherever I went, Busch was going to go the other way, and he was going to be able to get by me because he had so much more grip right then.

Q: In terms of getting up to the front, you had a lot of problems on pit road. (At one point, Edwards had lost a total of 18 spots on six pit stops under yellow). A big reason for that was your pit stall selection. Can you explain how that works and why it hurt you?

A: Well, the pit stall selection, the first thing that put us in that spot was qualifying poorly. We picked pits 29th out of 43 [drivers], so we didn't have much to choose from. [Crew chief] Bob [Osborne] ended up picking that pit stall based on practice speeds, thinking that the No. 88 car might end up a lap down during the race [opening up the stall in front of Edwards for an easy exit during yellow flag stops]. But [the 88] ended up running a lot better than Bob thought he was going to run.

So what ended up happening was Jeff Gordon [who had the pit stall behind Carl] was in front of me [on the track] most of the day and came on pit road first. Of the three of us, Jeff Gordon was first, I was second, and Dale Jr. was third coming into the pits. So Gordon would pull into his pit stall, and with mine immediately in front of his, I had to go around his guys and everything. It's like trying to parallel park with no room -- but I would still have to park my car. And then Dale Jr. would come around me and do the same thing and park his car in front of me. That left me boxed in, and it ended up that I could never put myself in the pit box the right way so we could do a fast pit stop.

I even asked Bob at one point; I said, "Can we just stop at someone else's pit stall, can we pick another person on pit road that's maybe like a lap down that we could just do our pit stops from their stall? Because my guys were doing the best they could, I was doing the best I could, but I just couldn't make it work. Every time we pulled on pit road, I backed up 3-5 spots every time. It was really tough mentally because you keep having to make it up, make it up [on the track]; I think it's one of the hardest times I've had in the car in terms of trying to keep from getting frustrated.

Q: Does the crew need Bob Osborne to pump them up after that? I mean, the whole situation really wasn't their fault, either ...

A: Well, to get to the bottom of it, our pit crew ... we've worked really hard on the pit crew these last few years. Our pit stops have been something that we've really tried to make better. We had a great group of guys at the beginning of the season, and we've lost two of them right now to injury, so we've had guys trying to fill in and change tires. The rear tire changer and front tire carrier ... they're thrust into this position and expected to perform right off the bat while the other guys are trying to recover from injury.

That's been really tough ... so our mission right now is to make the pit crew better so this doesn't ... I mean, we don't want to lose a championship because of this stuff. At a place like Atlanta, you can make it up, but at Martinsville, you can't. This would take you right out of the race. So it's a really important time for us on our pit crew, and it could cost us a lot if we don't fix it.

Q: Now that you've had time to sit back and assess your season during the off week ... it's been a different type of season than last year for you (0 wins, only 1 top 5 in '09 versus 2 wins through the same four races in '08). You're still in a good spot (4th in points), but did you feel like you'd have a lot more momentum coming into this season after the way you won two of the last three races last November?

A: Yeah, I feel like we have a different expectation for ourselves. I do, and I know our team does. We've raced four races ... we've performed really well. Daytona was great, but we didn't get the finish we wanted. California, we missed it, and at Vegas we had the fastest car but the engine blew up with less than two laps to go. And then we had the pit stop problem at Atlanta.

So we don't have the two wins we had at this point last year, but I feel like we're in a better position to perform better through the whole year. I feel like we're better off ... and if you look at the points right now and you look at them last year, the way Jimmie started the year in 2008 -- it's not the start of the year where the championship is won. The way it goes down, it's the last 10 races ... so we just have to make sure we're performing really well then.