FORT WORTH, Texas — Carl Edwards won at California Speedway. He won at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and he nearly won at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
And on Sunday, in the fourth race of the season for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series on an intermediate track, Edwards won at Texas Motor Speedway.
His third triumph of the season came in dominant fashion, as the Missouri driver drove his Aflac-sponsored Roush Fenway Racing Ford to victory, .399 second ahead of runner-up Jimmie Johnson.

NO QUACKING MATTER: Carl Edwards leads Kyle Busch during Sunday's Samsung 500 at Texas Motor Speedway. (Kory L. Hales Photo)

Edwards, who raced without crew chief Bob Osborne who is sitting out a six-race penalty after the team was found to have lost its oil tank cover following the victory at Las Vegas, led 123 laps en route to earning the $541,150 victory on the 1.5-mile superspeedway. It was Edwards’s second victory at TMS and the 10th triumph of his Sprint Cup career.
“The part that I do like, that I can specifically say I love, is what I feel like at a race track like this — and maybe it’s just my car — but I feel like I can make a difference out there lap to lap,” Edwards explained. “I can pitch the car sideways a little bit here, or play with the throttle a little bit here or there, and I can change what that stopwatch says every lap. And that’s cool. That’s what it’s about.”
Edwards blasted past Kyle Busch’s Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota to take the lead on lap 215 and gave up the point for only three circuits the remaining distance. Edwards took the lead for good on lap 233 and set the pace until the checkered flag waved on lap 339, following a green-white-checkered-flag finish brought on when Martin Truex, Jr. blew an engine late in the race.
“That restart, might not look exciting to people watching, but it was real exciting for me in the race car to try not to spin those tires and hold off Jimmie,” Edwards explained. “To win here, it means a lot. My first trip here was with Tony Roper. That was the weekend that he got killed here, and he was a great guy and it always means a lot to come back here, and to run well and to win these races is very special to me.”
Two-time defending series champion Johnson continued his resurgence, finishing in the top five for the second-consecutive week.
“Good run for us throughout the day today,” Johnson said. “I am just real proud of all the effort that has gone in to picking up our intermediate track program. It really showed today. It was a pretty eventful day. Ran up front, led a little bit. I think that clean air was really important. I was really shocked today in how bad the cars drove in traffic.”
Busch, who ran in the top five the entire race, finished third.
“If there’s a shot to go for second, then we would’ve taken it,” Busch said. “There at the end, it was just survival. It was about holding off those guys behind us. It wasn’t going to be moving forward at all because we were so tight. If we had a different race car, probably I would’ve tried a little bit harder, but it wasn’t worth it today.”
Ryan Newman, who was the best finishing Dodge driver, battled from a lap down at one point and finished fourth after stopping for four fresh tires prior to the final two-lap shootout.
“We started ‘off,’ I mean really ‘off,’” Newman said. “Roy (McCauley, crew chief) did a good job of adjusting on the car. We kept working on it and we made some good adjustments to make the car better and better all day. We eventually got a lap down, but when you’re 11th and going a lap down, that’s not too shabby. We’ve got some work to do.”
Busch’s Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Denny Hamlin and Tony Stewart finished fifth and seventh, respectively.
Point-leader Jeff Burton brought his Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet home sixth after starting 35th.
“Our guys fought real hard. We struggled,” Burton explained. “We were sometimes doing really good. Other times we weren’t. Every time we came out of the pit the car drove different. I’m not real sure we understand that, but we’re plugging away.”
Mark Martin, Matt Kenseth and Clint Bowyer filled the top 10.
Polesitter Dale Earnhardt, Jr. struggled to a 12th-place finish, while his Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jeff Gordon had a miserable day. Gordon crashed after struggling with an ill-handling Chevrolet and was scored 43rd for only the second time in his career. Texas remains one of only two tracks on the NASCAR Sprint Cup circuit where Gordon has not won.
The race was slowed by six yellow flags for 27 laps, while Edwards completed the distance in three hours, 30 minutes and 41 seconds at an average speed of 144.814 miles per hour.