September 2, 2012
By Kim Roberson
Kim Roberson
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Is Carl Edwards running out of time?
The clock is ticking on his chances to make the Chase, just a year after tying for the Championship.
So far, unless he wins tonight or next Saturday in Richmond, the man who many thought would be the top contender for 2012 will be on the outside looking in for the final ten races of the season.
If you ask Edwards, they aren’t watching the clock, but just focusing on getting to Victory Lane.
“I've never said we're out of time. I've never said that. What I've said is we've got to go out here, let it hang out, take the chances that you always want to take. But you're worried about the points outcome,” the driver of the No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion for Roush Fenway Racing explained earlier this week. “If I've given the wrong message, that's my fault. I've been trying to express to you guys our feeling, which is we recognize the position we're in. We don't like it. The only thing we can do is go out and race like we've got nothing to lose because in a way we don't.”
“We need to win. That's why you saw me stay out at Bristol and hang on to old tires, a low tank of fuel and try to hold the guys off, stay out front. Those are the kind of things we need to do if we don't have a dominant car.”
Part of Edwards’s frustration this season has been the bad luck factor that seems to be hanging over him and his team for most of 2012.
“Part of competition, the bigger part of competition in my mind, is dealing with circumstances that don't go the way you want them to. That's the tough thing to do. You've got to do that more than deal with winning. I've learned over the years for me to be successful, for our team to be successful, you can't let what happened last week, last year, last month affect you right now, whether it's good or bad.”
One of the hardest lessons a driver has to learn at any level is that no matter how well you have done in the past, it doesn’t ensure that you will have the same results the next year. “You can have a bunch of success, and that can affect you negatively because you feel like somehow you deserve continued success, which isn't true. You can let frustration and worry bother you over what's happened in the past, and that doesn't really do anything,” Carl explained. “Every time you show up at the racetrack, this weekend is a good example -- you show up at the racetrack, you have the same chance to win. You can hit the setup perfectly. You can make good decisions. Racing can go your way. All of a sudden you can get that victory that you need.”
The only problem for Carl and the No. 99 team is that chance to get the victory they need is falling into the “now or never” category. They have two more chances to get into the Chase -- tonight and next weekend. The season of “we have time” has come down to “the time is about to run out”.
Regardless of what happens over the next seven days, Edwards says he will live with the results. “You can drive yourself crazy wanting the whole world to be perfect, wanting everything to go your way. What I've realized for me personally, I don't know if this works for everybody, but the only way to come away from competition or a race or a season and feel content with it is to just lay everything you have on the table, do your very best, then don't look back. If you win, you win. If you don't, you don't. You can't change the outcome; you can only change the way you compete.”
“I've grown a lot over the years and been able to deal with success and failure a lot better on the racetrack," Edwards continued. "I think that's one of the neatest things, most valuable things that racing has taught me, is just to do your best. Winning is a helluva lot more fun than not winning, I can tell you that.
"But if you dwell on things and beat yourself up too much, you hurt your chances of winning more in the future. That took me a long time to learn.”
It’s going to be a hard pill for fans to swallow if he doesn’t make the Chase, but it appears that no matter what happens, Edwards will learn the lesson and apply that knowledge to next season. And hopefully, will have more success the next time around.
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