The victory often doesn’t go to the fastest, but to the slowest. That was the case in Saturday night’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Subway Fresh Fit 500 at Phoenix Int’l Raceway as the top two cars driven by winner Jimmie Johnson and second-place Clint Bowyer played the fuel mileage game, driving slow rather than fast.
The faster cars in the race had to overcome earlier mistakes just to get back toward the front.
That was the case with Carl Edwards, who pitted on lap 114 when Joe Nemechek crashed to bring out the yellow flag. Edwards’s pit crew also jumped over the wall too soon and NASCAR issued a penalty, which put Edwards one lap down. Edwards and his team fought back to finish fourth.
 “I don’t know that I’ve ever passed that many cars at a race track ever,” Edwards said. “The car was really good. That’s a great Ford Fusion there, but we just got some setbacks there, one penalty and one tire got loose. My hat is off to Jimmie Johnson and those guys. They’ve been running really hard and getting better and better and he earned it.”
Johnson earned it by using the old strategy, in order to finish first, first you must finish. He also used the strategy of going “slow enough to win” as he nursed his fuel tank to make it to the distance.
Edwards couldn’t afford that luxury once he was mired back in the pack. He had to race to hard in order to have a fighting chance of a top-five finish.
“Yeah, it was an adventure, to say the least,” Edwards said. “We passed a lot of cars and then we just had a problem in the pits, got a penalty. We came back quickly, though. Everything fell into place, Robbie (Reiser, interim crew chief) made some great calls, but then we had another bad pit stop, and that set us back.
“But to come out of here fourth with all the trouble we had tonight, that’s a blessing. I’m not going to complain too much about that.”
Edwards made the best of a bad situation, but that still doesn’t ease the pain of knowing he probably had the best car in the race.
“That’s a race-winning car right there, that’s a good one,” Edwards said of his Ford. “So, that’s cool. It’s good that we’ve done really, really well on the mile-and-a-halfs, and to be able to come here and have that fast of a race car, a car that I thought could win the race under some different circumstances, that’s really good.”
Mark Martin had a Chevrolet that was capable of winning Saturday night’s race, but he gave up the lead to pit on lap 302, just 10 laps from the finish.
“Well, we were saving gas,” Martin said. “I thought we were trying to go, so we were real, real slow. I was just putting around out there. We had such an incredible car. I planned that run with 80 (laps) to go when we pitted.
“I asked, ‘Can we go?’ and we were just sort of saving the gas and trying to be there. I guess there was some confusion on the figuring and they decided that we were going to have to come (in for a pit stop).”
Martin finished fifth.
“I’m just really proud of the team and I want them to keep their chin up because I want to win some of these races,” Martin said of his DEI team. “And they can do it. They can do it on pit road. And they gave me a race car to win with tonight. Clearly (it was) one of the better cars out there on the race track, if not the best, you know, at the end. We sort of spent the whole race getting ready for a good run there at the end.
“We just about pulled this one off tonight. We had a great, great car. We changed our strategy right there at the end. I saved a lot of gas, probably a lot more than they knew.”