HAMPTON, Ga. — It was a long week for Nextel Cup Series driver Carl Edwards and it got a little longer at Atlanta Motor Speedway, as a collection of his closest competitors took advantage of the opportunity to rip into the controversial driver.
Edwards faked punching his Roush Fenway Racing teammate following the conclusion of the Oct. 21 race at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway.
Two days after that he apologized — kind of.
“I was definitely wrong for showing my anger and putting on an aggressive display toward Matt Kenseth after the race at Martinsville,” Edwards said. “I want to apologize to my fans, to Office Depot, to Matt Kenseth, to DeWalt, to everyone at Roush Fenway for letting it come to that. That was definitely the wrong thing to do.”
Edwards continued that he felt a lack of “team spirit” from his teammates.
On the weekend, the competitors spoke out.
“I have had problems with Edwards,” said Elliott Sadler. “I had problems at Richmond a couple years ago when he spun me out in the Busch race and he didn’t like some of the things I said in the paper, I guess. He came and confronted me at the driver’s meeting the next day pretty much in the same manner he did with Kenseth. I don’t know. I don’t think it’s right especially if it’s teammates. But, that’s not my fight. I don’t have a dog in it. I’ll let Jack Roush or Matt Kenseth or Carl or whoever, however they want to talk about it, battle it out or whatever they’re interested in doing.”
Kenseth acknowledged he and Edwards are not friends.
“I don’t hang out with him that much to really know that, but I guess I was a little surprised to see what I saw there,” Kenseth said. “But yet that’s a side I see of him every once in a while or that maybe some people see that other people don’t, so I guess that’s probably all everybody meant. I mean, that’s kind of opposite as he looks in interviews.”
Team owner Jack Roush was the one responsible for sorting out the Edwards versus Kenseth mess.
“I’ve been engaged all week trying to understand what the reasons were and what the frustration was behind the conflict between Carl and Matt, and I think we have the measure of it,” he explained. “Certainly, Carl realizes that he wasn’t a friend to Matt and Matt, I think, is anxious to have Carl get some relief from the dilemma he finds himself in. We’re working our way through the aftermath of the conflict that was regrettable, and I think in the future, in a scenario where there will be conflict and differences of opinion, that we’ll be able to avoid that confrontation.”
Kurt Busch was once Edwards’s teammate at Roush.
“With the way ‘The Carl’ is referred to in the Roush organization, because there is only one of them, he is ‘The Carl;’ he seems to not be getting along with some of the other drivers that are over there,” Busch said. “I’ve seen it all along with him. He’ll give you that flashy smile, but at the same time he’s got something underneath his breath for you. Now it’s just starting to appear. We’ll just see how it goes. All those guys are great drivers. Jack has always let the drivers decide how they’re going to sort out their differences and that might not have been the best way to do things.”
One of those most critical of Edwards has been his teammate, Greg Biffle.
“I feel like we’ve thrown a lot of stones over the last week at everybody involved in this thing, but, really, the moral of the story is that Carl was a little bit out of line and I think we all know that and he’s admitted that,” Biffle said. “We just need to mend that relationship between him and Matt and they need to race each other better on the race track, and that’s what this boils down to. It doesn’t boil down to a personality conflict.  It doesn’t boil down to how a person acts. It doesn’t boil down to who is friends and who isn’t friends. It boils down to how you race one another on the race track.”