Good Effort by Carl Edwards isn’t Good Enough

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Carl Edwards did all he can do at Atlanta Motor Speedway and it wasn’t close to being enough.

Edward’s Roush-Fenway owned Office Depot Ford Fusion won at NASCAR’s fastest track; but unfortunately for him, Chad Knaus and Jimmy Johnson were pulling off a miracle finish.  The smartest crew chief in NASCAR never let his driver panic and used a late pit stop for fresh  tires to pull off a second place finish.  Johnson restarted in eleventh place with the new Goodyears and quickly passed all in front except for Edwards.

Johnson had gone a lap down to the leaders early on when he was caught for speeding on pit road.  He and Knaus systematically moved back to a position to where they could make the late run.  Edwards was surprised to find out that Johnson had come all the way back to second:

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Yeah, I looked up there on the scoreboard, saw he was running seventh, eighth, ninth, somewhere in there most of the second half of the race.  When Dave said, What do you think about Jimmie finishing second, I thought he was joking.  I truly didn’t know until I looked at the scoreboard that Jimmie had made that back up.  I got to see some video.  They put on some tires and went for it.  That’s pretty amazing.

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Johnson’s second place finish increased his lead over Greg Biffle, Jeff Burton and Edwards.  The party is truly over.  There is no way that any of the three can overcome their defecit to knock off Johnson.  And that leads us to this weeks BUZZ ON PIT ROW:

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Now that Johnson has all but wrapped up the title with three races to go; should NASCAR look at changing the Chase format to keep more drivers involved longer?

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Let us know what you think and we could use your comment on this week’s ON PIT ROW.  Listen live from 5-7pm ET at www.onpitrow.com or at www.arcaracing.com.  give us a call at 877-502-8255 and we could select your call as the Shell Gunk Free Call of the Day and you could win a Kevin Harvick bobblehead.

photo credit:  Rusty Burroughs/Getty Images/NASCAR