By Bruce Martin

TALLADEGA, Ala. — When Carl Edwards ran into the back of Greg Biffle, triggering a multi-car crash in the closing stages of Sunday’s AMP Energy 500 at Talladega Superspeedway, it became the nightmare scenario for Roush Fenway Racing.
On a day when Edwards spun himself out on pit lane and made several extra pit stops during caution periods, he was still in pretty good shape as the race was nearing its conclusion.
But in an attempt to bump draft teammate Biffle’s Ford to move the line of cars to the front, it lifted the rear wheels of Biffle’s Ford off the ground and triggered a 12-car pileup on lap 175 of the scheduled 188-lap race.
Biffle, Edwards and Matt Kenseth were all Roush Fenway Racing drivers involved in the incident. David Ragan finished third for the team, but the crash dramatically impacted the team’s chances in The Chase.
“It came right down to the final judgment of people deciding how aggressive they could be and, of course, Carl wound up pushing harder on Greg than he could stand,” team owner Jack Roush said. “NASCAR had set that up by allowing people to push all day. All day long people pushed in the corners and pushed in the tri-oval and pushed in the straightaway and pushed all the way around the race track. It was real clear to me and I think it was clear to everybody, including Carl, that if you weren’t willing to push the car in front of you, then you couldn’t advance as well as somebody else would that was doing the pushing. 
“But he pushed too hard and, of course, the worst possible result occurred.”
Edwards finished 29th and dropped to 72 points behind the leader, Jimmie Johnson, in The Chase.
“I was worried about the idiots when you come here and I was the guy that caused that one,” Edwards said. “I was just pushing Greg as hard as I could. It’s my fault, and I apologize to everybody caught up in that wreck. We had been pushing each other a lot, and it had been going really well. We just got in exactly the wrong spot there going into three and he got real loose, and that was just the way it went. It’s my fault. I feel bad that I took my teammates out. 
“I know Matt’s mad, and I’m sure Greg’s mad, but you just do the best you can and hope for the best. It just didn’t work out today. Sometimes things like this happen.”
Biffle’s 24th-place finish dropped him 77 points out of the lead. He let his teammate off the hook and blamed the incident on the nature of racing at Talladega.
“You can’t blame Carl,” Biffle said. “He was trying to help us, and he pushed us all the way to the front down the backstretch. We talked about it last night. We talked about it the night before. We talked about it today as far as what we were gonna do and that was our deal — to get teamed up and shove each other all the way to the front. We had been able to push around the corner all day, and I don’t know if I was moving down or he was moving up, but maybe when he came to push a little bit it just instantly slid. 
“I had my foot in the gas, and it just spun the tires and went around and that’s all she wrote.”