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 Or did he?
This is racing, where sometimes the rules are a little different.
Did Edwards goof by letting the slower car and driver Kevin Harvick
win the Sprint Cup race at Phoenix International Raceway on Sunday?
In the closest race at the Phoenix track since the Sprint Cup
started racing there in 1988, Edwards came up 0.010 seconds short.
On the last lap and in the final turns Edwards nudged Harvick, who
banged doors with him once the Toyota driver was alongside and
barely beat him to the finish stripe despite another bit of fender
banging by Edwards.
Maybe Sprint Cup drivers have become too chummy and respectful to
manhandle one another with the checkers in sight.
Edwards said he hit Harvick as hard as possible without wrecking
him. The teams all work too hard, he said, to take away a victory by
heavy contact even if his car was faster. "Those guys, everybody
works hard here and if we would've had one more lap, I could have
passed him clean," said Edwards. "But it just wasn't going to work
without bumping him. So I decided to hit him as hard as I did. I
really didn't want to wreck him, but I thought I moved him enough to
get by, but that's just racing."
 In a sport where the rules are often decided by the participants
themselves, Edwards came down on the side of not taking a victory
from the team that had been faster for the entire second half of the
500-kilometer event. But after a late caution, Edwards still had the
faster car for the final two laps of overtime due to two fresh
tires. If he reaches the summertime without a race victory and
making the Chase is bearing down on him, he might be looking back on
this desert race feeling like he was Wiley Coyote to Harvick's Road
Runner.
Harvick gained entry to the postseason Chase, became the fourth
different winner in four races and his Stewart-Haas Racing team
became the fourth different team in victory lane this year.
Harvick is nicknamed Happy for three reasons. First, it's pretty
obvious when he's happy. And, it's also obvious when he's not.
Often, he's just plain stoic. After winning his fifth race at
Phoenix in six starts by not much more than a front splitter,
Harvick was relieved as much as anything, describing himself as
"lucky as hell."
He's supposed to win on the mile oval where he has eight victories,
four of them with Stewart-Haas. Harvick's only loss at Phoenix in
the last six races occurred last fall when Dale Earnhardt Jr. took a
rain-shortened victory, which turned into an upside down Happy day.
"I know that you leave here and you don't win, you're disappointed,"
said Harvick of the expectations he has coming into the desert mile.
"We had the rain situation last time, and we were all fairly
distraught over the situation and not winning the race. It's a
pressured situation that when you come here, your team and your guys
and yourself, you expect to be in contention to win the race, but
sometimes circumstances dictate exactly what happens at the end of
the race."
Would Harvick have been more aggressive had he been the overtaking
driver instead of Edwards?
"I don't think there's any real love lost between the two of us," he
said. "You know, I knew that I was going to get hit, and I'm going
to hit him in the same type of manner, just for the fact that I
don't want to spin him out. But you definitely want to rough him up
because that's not the guy that I want to lose to, and I know he
doesn't want to lose to me."
So these two guys are not chummy, although they did have an amicable
conversation after the race. One of those where the winner swears on
a stack of metaphorical bibles he would have done the same thing as
the loser.
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Did the race fan who wants to see "win at all costs" and fists
flailing at race's end get short-changed? It's hard to argue against
a finish decided by 0.010 seconds and contact on three occasions en
route to the checkered flag. In the end, the longtime leader who
almost got caught out by a late caution was able to hold the lead
despite guys pitting behind him for fresh rubber. (If leader Harvick
had pitted, of course, several others, including Edwards, would have
stayed out and Harvick would have lost too much track position to
make it back to the front.)
Had Edwards hit Harvick harder and gotten the Stewart-Haas Chevy
cockeyed in Turn 3, then Harvick couldn't have retaliated and
Edwards might have gained the several inches he needed.
As it was, Harvick was masterful on defense.
"I was fully expecting everything that I got," said Harvick, "but I
just needed to be able to get knocked up the track far enough to be
able to put the throttle back down. Maybe a little bit too
defensive. I missed the bottom with the way that the rubber had
built up on the racetrack, it just kind of walked up the track and
he was able to hold the bottom and able to get to the left rear.
"I felt like I got back to the throttle even soon enough to be able
to hold him off," continued Harvick, "but I was kind of a couple
feet behind and was able to kind of scrub against his door a little
bit to slow him back down. And by the time he'd realized that he was
going to be behind, we had carried the momentum by him and we were
at the start-finish line."
The incident was a far cry from Joey Logano ramming Matt Kenseth at
200 mph in the race in Kansas last fall with the checkers looming.
That left Kenseth no chance to retaliate - until he took Logano's
Ford into the fence at Martinsville, Va. two races later.
NASCAR officials made no move to penalize Logano for the Kansas
incident, sending a clear message it's OK for a trailing car to take
out a slower leader by force. History also says if the faster guy
reaches your rear bumper, all bets are off, although 200 mph is a
little high for ramming speed. Of course, it's easy to reach your
opponent's rear bumper if you use it as a brake...
In Phoenix, Edwards elected a more nuanced path at relatively slower
speeds.
Given the "comers and goers" occasioned by the new low downforce
package and softer tires from Goodyear, there'll be opportunity
enough for more substantive passionate disagreements as the season
progresses. And odds are that if Edwards is involved, he'll be far
less likely to leave matters to chance or subtle about the laying on
of fenders.
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