Edwards Sweeps Atlanta With Nextel Cup Series Victory

· Carl Edwards captured his third NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series victory and second straight at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

· The last Ford driver to sweep both races at the same track was last season when Kurt Busch won twice at New Hampshire International Speedway.

· Today’s win is the 14th of the season for Ford, which is four more than last year.

· Ford has 568 all-time NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series wins.

· The win was Ford’s 29^th all-time Cup triumph at Atlanta Motor Speedway, which is tied for the most by the manufacturer at any active speedway. Ford has also won 29 times at Bristol Motor Speedway.

· This marks the fifth time in 2005 that Roush Racing has had at least three drivers finish in the top five. The last time it occurred was Sept. 10 at Richmond when Kurt Busch, Matt Kenseth and Greg Biffle swept the top three spots.

MARK MARTIN – No. 6 Viagra Taurus (Finished 3^rd) – “When it came time to go racing a couple of them snuck up there and outran us, but, man, we put a whooping on a lot of them today. If I had cars like that every week, man, I think I could drive until I was 60.” YOU’RE OPTIMISTIC AFTER A GREAT WEEKEND. “Yeah, who said I was a pessimist. I knew we were good on Friday and I knew we’d have a shot. It seemed to come and go for everybody today. We weren’t quite good enough to pull it off at the end, but it was a great run and I’m proud of it.”

GREG BIFFLE – No. 16 National Guard/Charter Taurus (Finished 7^th) – “I was just loose all day. I thought I might have too much rear spring for it and it kind of took a dive for life and put some rubbers in the left-rear spring and put some wedge in it for that last run and it just killed my car. It was way too tight and I lost a couple of spots there, but it was a good day for us. We didn’t do what we wanted to do here and that was run in the top three or four and we missed that by a little bit. We finished seventh or something like that, so we have to be happy with that.” YOU’RE ALREADY THINKING ABOUT TEXAS. “Yeah, they were asking me coming down pit road if we were taking this car to Texas because we’ve got chassis 239 that’s a really fast race car too just sitting there ready to go. We’ve got a choice as to which one we want to take. We’re gonna have to sit down and think about it and take the best car.” THREE TO GO. “We just have to make up points on the 20. We made up a little bit on the 48 today and a little bit on the 12, but we’ve got to finish more than one spot ahead of the 20 to gain anything on him. But those guys are doing a good job. They’re in a points mode and that’s what they’re doing.” THE ROUSH CARS WERE ALL STRONG. “Yeah, we were terrible all day. We just never got a hold of the race track. I really don’t know why, but I’m scratching my head.”

MATT KENSETH – No. 17 DeWalt/USG Sheetrock Taurus (Finished 5^th) – “That was great. It was a good day for us, a real good day in the points. It would have been a little better without the mysterious caution, but other than that we had a great day. We finished in the top five and got to lead a lap there at the end, so it was a good, solid day.” DO YOU FEEL YOU’RE STILL IN THE POINTS CHASE? “I don’t know where we are right now exactly, but we’re closer than we were before the day started so that’s good.” ROUSH WAS STRONG TODAY. “Yeah, Carl is awesome here. Carl is an old dirt track racer and he lays it right up there on the cushion and I can’t get that done up there. For some reason my car will wreck, so he does a great job. Mark had a great test here and he gave us a lot of information as far as shocks and bars and stuff. Everybody is working good together and everybody ran good today.”

CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Office Depot Taurus – VICTORY LANE INTERVIEW – “It’s unbelievable. I have the greatest crew. We got Office Depot to Victory Lane and that means the world to me. Office Depot came on board when we really needed it. I’d like to say hi to mom and dad and everybody at home – all of my friends and family. I’ve been a little bit hard to live with the last few weeks, but this is just the greatest day. This is unbelievable.” WHAT TRICK DID YOU HAVE MIDWAY THROUGH THE RACE? “I’m not telling you what it is, but we have a great race car. It’s unbelievable. It’s so much fun. We’re gonna go testing tomorrow with the new cars and this is what we need. We need to do this for three more weeks and we’ll be all right.” YOU’RE FOURTH IN THE TITLE CHASE. “I just have to thank Bob Osborne and Jack Roush and everyone in the motor department. The engines in these cars unbelievable, but most of all all the folks behind me. We’ve got great sponsors. It’s just unbelievable. This is great.”

RICKY RUDD – No. 21 Motorcraft Genuine Parts Taurus (Finished 17^th) – “We got on one set of tires and the car was really bad loose and we just couldn’t do anything. That probably didn’t affect us too much. Our best shot might have been about an eighth or 11^th, but not much better than that. We weren’t good all day. It wasn’t from a lack of trying. They tried to do everything they could, but we just never could get it to hook up and stick on the bottom like we had here last time.”

ELLIOTT SADLER – No. 38 M&M’s Taurus (Finished 10^th) – “I’m just glad we saw the checkered flag. We’ve had a lot of great cars here the last month and a half and haven’t been able to show it, so to see the checkered flag and get a top 10 was a big relief to this team. I’m proud of my guys. We had great pit stops all day. We tried to adjust on it and was just a little free, but, all in all, it was a great day.”

DALE JARRETT – No. 88 UPS Taurus (Finished 14^th) – “We got to be reasonable at times, but I don’t know if the track tightened up or if it was something with our car, but the last two runs I just got so tight that it killed me. I couldn’t go anywhere. I don’t know if we over-adjusted earlier and just never got it back, but it was an OK day. It was a brand new car so I think we learned some things.”

MORE MATT KENSETH – “We were just too loose all day off the corner and never could really fix it. All day from our speeds we had a third to seventh-place car and we finished fifth, so that was great. Everybody did a good job this weekend. We had a little change in personnel – a different car chief this week and some other stuff going on – and everybody pulled together and did a good job. We had great stops as always. The car was pretty good and besides the driver speeding down pit road and forgetting to put the right side window in, everything else went really good.”

MORE GREG BIFFLE – “It wasn’t the car I was thinking I was gonna have, but the guys did a great job in the pits and I kept it off the wall and didn’t get any flat tires. We just did everything we needed to do, really. I’m pretty excited about it. We wanted a top five, but ended up seventh so we can’t really complain about that run.”

MARK MARTIN PRESS CONFERENCE – THOUGHTS ON LETTING TEAMMATES LEADING LAPS. “I didn’t see that happen. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t see it. I know Carl didn’t let me lead. I didn’t want him to. I told those guys, ‘Don’t say anything to him because I don’t want to give it back when I get it.’ We had new tires and he didn’t, so we just waited until we got up there and went on. We had new tires and I don’t know anything about the rest of it. I didn’t see it.” HOW MANY GUYS ARE STILL IN THIS TITLE HUNT? “I’m in (laughter in the room).” WHAT WERE YOU THINKING WHEN YOU HAD TO DROP BACK AFTER THE PIT ROAD PENALTY? “When that red light comes on up there you’re speeding, so it doesn’t matter. We misjudged our speed today. That’s the first time that it’s happened. If I’ve got caught speeding before it was because I was over my speed, but I wasn’t over my speed today but obviously the red light came on and that meant I was going too fast. So we missed that. That was our fault. I had such a good race car for once I wasn’t too flipped out about it. I knew we could come back up through there. We were leading the race pretty easy at the time. As the race went on a couple three of these guys got stronger and we got back where we belonged with what we had. It was just an incredible race car today. If I could drive cars like that, I could race these things until I was 60.”

CARL EDWARDS PRESS CONFERENCE -- “The car was just unbelievable. We started the day out and we were just a little bit free and some other cars had their act together right from the beginning, most notably Dale Jr. He really set the bar really far up there, so we worked on our car a little bit. Bob was really conscious of the magnitude of our changes and he kept everything really simple and it just got better and better. There at the end I was having a blast. I can’t believe we ended up winning the race. That’s pretty cool to say the least. I just can’t get over the fact that we’ve won three races so far this season. That means so much to me that I can’t describe it.”

BOB OSBORNE, Crew Chief – THOUGHTS FROM THE PIT BOX. “It was pretty tense in my eyes. He’s running the high line – the quote-unquote Darlington line – but he didn’t scratch the car too bad. I was pretty nervous the whole race, really. I felt we had a pretty decent car, but Carl was right, Dale Earnhardt Jr. really set the pace. That was pretty impressive and we were trying to run him down early on and we couldn’t. Carl can speak more on that than I can, but we definitely were trying to run him down and we couldn’t, so he had the car to beat. But we worked on it slowly but surely and tried to move up through the field and it worked out for us.”

CARL EDWARDS CONTINUED – TV MENTIONED SOME SORT OF TRICK UP YOUR SLEEVE. “No, I just had a trick that was working for me. I wasn’t gonna tell anybody about it, so I’m still not gonna tell anybody about it. I was just trying to tell him, ‘Don’t worry. I’m taking it easy. We’ll be all right.’ I was trying to pace myself. I could kill the right-rear tire if we went real hard, so mostly I was just saving it and I wanted him to believe me so I said I had a trick.” IS THERE ENOUGH TIME FOR YOU OR OTHER GUYS TO MAKE A RUN AND CATCH TONY? “Absolutely we’re making a run. That’s what we’re here doing today – just doing our very best. We had some bad runs. We ran poorly at New Hampshire and Martinsville, and I’m just not as good as I need to be at those tracks yet, so what we’re gonna do is take advantage of these tracks that we are good at, and we have great cars for, and we’re gonna do our best to make a run. If we can pick up 35 points for the next three races I think we’ll still lose by two points, but something like that – 36 points we’ll win it by a point. Anyway, that’s what we’re gonna try to do. We’re gonna go out here and make a run for the championship. I did not expect to be able to pick up this many points today and anything can happen in racing, so we’re not gonna quit until the last lap of the last race.”

JACK ROUSH – “We sure hate that Kurt Busch had his problem early, except for that we could have maybe put all of them in there. We’re really good at mile-and-a-half race tracks right now. The guys have got the cars worked out so that they don’t hurt the tires. They manage to be able to run a tire run with them now and some of our contemporaries can’t do that, and they have reasonable speed. The engines – Doug Yates and Robert Yates and all the guys working on the engines are doing a great job. The engines today were just awesome and, of course everybody that worked on the car and screwed things together so nothing fell off of them. We had good pit stops. The pit stops were great. I was talking to Sheri on the way in. For Carl this is three times he’s been to Atlanta and he’s qualified top 10 all three times and finished third and two firsts here. I think he’s got this Atlanta thing figured out. Of course, Bob’s not slowing down either. I’m really proud to be with them here. I looked at the setup they had before they started and they were taking a little more risk than they have in recent history, but Bob threaded the needle just fine and Carl kept it under him and here we sit.”

CARL EDWARDS CONTINUED – DID YOU HAVE A DRIVELINE VIBRATION AND ARE YOU GOING TO DYE YOUR HAIR RED? “As far as the first question, I was just whispering in Bob’s ear about the vibration. Jack thinks I’m possessed or have some sort of imagination about vibrations…

JACK ROUSH CONTINUED – “People talk to their race cars and they go back and forth on that, but Carl hears some really strange things from his cars that the rest of us don’t know much about.”

CARL EDWARDS CONTINUED – “At least it does it when it’s fast only. It was just a vibration. We have something that happens every once in a while. It vibrates and it shakes pretty good. I’ve talked to other drivers and they say that’s just how they shake, but I just have a hard time understanding why it does it sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t.”

JACK ROUSH CONTINUED – “There was one time today, and I don’t know how Bob coped with that, but he clicked the mike and said, ‘Do you feel that?’”

CARL EDWARDS CONTINUED – “I said, ‘Do you hear it?’ So, anyway, as far as my hair, I did say that I would dye my hair green if we won at Charlotte and I have not said anything after that, so I am keeping my hair the same as it is right now. I don’t know. If you guys think it would look good red, but I don’t know about red. I don’t plan on it.” WHAT MAKES RIDING THE TOP SO COMFORTABLE FOR YOU? “That’s my favorite place to run, so I just really enjoy it. It’s a blast. I used to race at this track in Holt Summit, Missouri and the fast line – they had this little guard rail up in turn one – and the fast line used to be with the right-side tires up on the guard rail. We won two track championships there just driving it on the guard rail. I just like racing against the top of the race track. It’s a lot of fun. I was worried that I would slip up and make a mistake, but the car was good enough that I didn’t have to drive hard enough to be in danger. It was just fun. I just really like running the top. That’s one of the greatest things about Atlanta.”

JACK ROUSH CONTINUED – DID YOU EVER THINK CARL WOULD BE THE DRIVER WITH MAYBE THE BEST SHOT FOR A THIRD STRAIGHT TITLE? “Carl’s been a real surprise. We had a strategy last year when we didn’t restrict the number of races we ran to seven. We ran as many races as we could. I forgot how many it was, but that’s the reason he’s not a rookie this year even though it is his first full year. But for him to have led this team to three victories and to have the blue sky that he’s got and the potential he’s got is beyond my wildest imagination.”

BOB OSBORNE CONTINUED – DID THE AIR PRESSURE RULE AFFECT YOU AT ALL? “Actually, it didn’t. We baselined practice on Friday exactly how we finished the race here in the spring, so we started with the same setup and monitored how the air pressures made the car change and went from there.”

JACK ROUSH CONTINUED – “As far as Goodyear managing the tire and the risk to the tire with air-pressure, as long as they do that for everybody it’s great. We certainly don’t have a problem. At Charlotte, when the whole business came up of monitoring the pressure during the middle of the race, there was substantial variance in the tire pressure gauges that they were taking from team to team and, of course, we hadn’t been encouraged to calibrate our tire-pressure gauges before the race started, so there was some variance in ours as well. The variance that we had from what they recommended was just a few tenths of a pound or a half a pound based on the fact that I believe that the gauges were off. It may be our gauges that were off, but the worst time that we’ve ever had in the big picture – the worst time in this business we’ve had with tires – is when we had Hoosier and Goodyear doing a tire war back in the late eighties or early nineties. That was just terrible. Happily, we’re not doing that right now. We rely on Goodyear to give us a nice, safe tire and to encourage us to use it in such a way that it will keep us out of trouble with it. Having said that, there is a component of risk that the crew chiefs manage and the drivers manage that’s part of our racing. If you go out and run these tires before they build the pressure and when the tires are cold, or even after the pressure comes up, if you run them as hard as you can on the first part of a tire run, you won’t have enough tire left to finish a tire run. So the driver and the crew chief and the spotter together work as a team to manage the life in the tires so that they’ve got enough tire left to run a load of fuel out. To have that taken away from the racing would be something, I think, that would diminish the ability of the guys with the experience and with the keen judgement to really race to the top. Goodyear has done a nice job. NASCAR has done a nice job. If they want to mandate tire pressures, that’s OK. They picked the tires and tell us what we’d run, that’s just one more thing that they could do to keep everybody out of trouble, but, in the meantime, with whatever is left I’m anxious for my guys to take as much risk as they can without being foolhardy and, by and large, we do that.”

CARL EDWARDS CONTINUED – WHERE IS YOUR CONFIDENCE WITH THREE TO GO? “I feel very good about these last three races. I think we’ve only raced one race at Texas – one Cup race. I damaged the car just a little bit. Earlier this season I think we would have had a good race at Texas and I got into a little bit of a hurry and damaged the front of the car and we ended up not running very well. Texas is kind of an unknown. I love Homestead. We ran great at Phoenix this year. We finished seventh and we had an awesome car, so I feel great about our chances coming up to these next few races. But anything can happen. We could run great or we could run awful, but we’re gonna try our very best. There’s still an opportunity to win a championship.” WHAT CAR ARE YOU TAKING TO TEXAS? “It’s a good question. I would like to take the car we just ran. The guys have done a really awesome job of catering to what I’ve wanted to do and brought this car to Kansas, Charlotte and here, so I guess that would be a question for Bob.”

BOB OSBORNE CONTINUED – “I’m planning on taking the sister car to the one we just raced this weekend. It’s a brand new car, built exactly like the one we’ve got here. It’s not out of the ordinary for us to bring new cars to the race track sight unseen, so to speak.”

CARL EDWARDS CONTINUED – WAS IT A TRACK POSITION RACE? “He’s asking how much of a role track position played in the race today and I believe you’re right. Track position was pretty big here. I noticed that early on. There was one point where we kind of got shuffled back on a restart, but, really, it was only a track position type of race for maybe the first 10 or 12 laps of tire run and after that you could move around so much that you could make your car work, you could pass people. But what happens is everybody is so fast when they drop the green with new tires that everybody just nails it to the bottom, wide-open, and it’s really hard to pass somebody in that situation. It’s fast like a Charlotte was for a whole tire run, but the tires fall off more here. Track position would have been key in a short run, but on a long run it wasn’t that big of a deal.” SOME GUYS WERE ABLE TO GET AWAY A BIT EARLY. “I did think about that because Dale Jr., he did, he got away. When he was leading, he could get away, and we did the same thing. When we were leading it was easy to get away from the guys behind us. It could be because of clean air. It could be because the guys are back there racing one another. The speeds are so high that if you get side-by-side with somebody you have to slow down so much because you lose side force and down force and the optimum line. I don’t know. That’s a good question. I’ll take track position any day. I was really happy for our qualifying effort because of that, but, overall, on a long run I feel like we could have passed people.”

BOB OSBORNE CONTINUED -- WHAT DID YOU SAY TO CARL WHEN HE WAS CHASING JUNIOR. “This race track has a unique characteristic of wearing tires out extremely fast and the only reason why we tried to coach him not to push the car and pass the 8 car is so that the tire life would be there, so on a longer run – if that came about – he would still be able to be quick and not destroy a tire in the process.” HOW DO YOU RATE THE CHASE NOW? “It’s more of a track by track basis for the next three races. There will be situations where we just ride and there will be situation where we push hard and go for the pass, but it just depends on the situation and the race track that we’re at at the moment.”

CARL EDWARDS CONTINUED – DID YOU LET MATT PASS YOU LATE IN THE RACE? “I didn’t allow him to pass me. I think he thought I did, which is awesome, but Matt got by me and I saw his finger sticking out. I was like, ‘Why is he giving me the finger?’ I kind of moved over a little bit and I could see his knuckles and he was giving me the pointer finger like, ‘OK, just give me a minute.’ I was thinking, ‘OK, now I see what’s going on. He wants to lead a lap.’ And then he was very gracious and I got up beside him and he didn’t fight me too hard. I think we had a better car than Matt after about five or six laps, but he was real fast on the get-go, so he could have held us up and made it harder, but that was very nice of him and I was glad to let him lead a lap. But he thinks I let him lead a lap and that’s what’s really important. Anyway, Mark Martin and I talked about it earlier before the race. I mean, my teammates have done so much for me that I really think trying to help them in a position when I can help them is the right thing to do. I’m not saying I always will, but they’re yelling at me to quit talking so I’m gonna stop.”

JACK ROUSH CONTINUED – DO YOU SEE MORE ENGINEERS AS CREW CHIEFS IN THE FUTURE? “I’m gonna start off and say, ‘Bless their hearts,’ but there was a point in time when some of these crew chiefs couldn’t read and that was a long time ago. They were very successful – some of them were very successful – but it’s different now. And there are people that will tell you that demons abide in these cars, but when you look at the science of it, they probably don’t. It’s probably just something that you don’t understand. For a crew chief to be able to lead a team and lead a driver, you can’t get lost in mania, you can’t get lost in conjecture, you can’t get lost in rumor. You’ve got to take things apart and decide what you know to be true and what confuses you and deal with things analytically that are confusing. Bob’s in a position to do that based on his education. Most of the guys, even without an engineering degree, can do that but Bob and Matt Borland and Ray Evernham – and the guys that have been crew chiefs in recent times that did have a mechanical engineering degree as it were – I believe are setting the trend for the future. They’re certainly establishing a very high mark for the guys that would not have the formal education to take apart the problems for things that they do not understand. The great thing about Bob. Bob was a student of all the history and all the things that have happened to these race cars based on an imperfect world, so he understood the way things worked in the real world and he also understood how to take it apart and get into a book and analyze some data and reach a conclusion that made sense. So I think it’s gonna be harder for the guys that don’t have a formal, technical education to be able to deal with the things that come up as quickly as the ones who do have. I’m just proud that Bob is here and that I can hold him up to the other guys and say, ‘Look, either consult with Bob about your issues or use Bob as an example in the way that he deals with his problems.” THOUGHTS ON THE 97 APPEARING TO BE OUT OF IT. “It’s unfortunate. Jimmy and the team and Crown Royal and Newell Rubbermaid and Sharpie and all the other folks that stand behind it have made the same kind of sweat equity investment in that program as it did last year and by all appearance it’s not gonna be able to enjoy the ultimate success of being able to win a championship. But Roush Racing – the 97 and before that the 17, and for that matter all five of our teams this year – have had more good fortune than the average of our contemporaries. I knew we were gonna have to give some of that back and I feared that we’d have to give enough of it back that we would not be in the top 10 with more than one or two of our cars. Fortunately, we were able to carry that, so that meant to me that I got more than my share of good luck in the 26 races that preceded the chase. Of course, now we’re giving some more of it back. We’ve had some things that have struck here and there. If you look at the way this is gonna shake out, the points starting the chase were so close for all 10 competitors in there and the performance of the cars are so close that the issue is being really resolved by who has trouble. Who breaks a part. Who gets involved in the wreck. Like Ku