BROOKLYN, Mich. \u2014 When Carl Edwards saw the Ford of Roush Fenway Racing teammate Ricky Stenhouse Jr. blow by him with 21 laps left in Saturday\u2019s Alliance Truck Parts 250, he was worried.<\/p>\n
Just as crew chief Mike Beam predicted he would, however, Edwards caught Stenhouse in the closing laps, passed his teammate on Lap 117 of 125 and pulled away to win his fourth NASCAR Nationwide Series race of the season and the 33rd of his career.
\n
\n\u201cRicky drove his heart out\u2014that guy is unbelievable,\u201d Edwards said in victory lane. \u201cI didn\u2019t think I was going to be able to get him, but it was like his car got tightened up. Man, he did a good job. \u2026 I thought Ricky was setting sail.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t think I was going to be able to catch him. His car, I don\u2019t think, was balanced as well as mine was, and he was somehow making it go that fast. So he\u2019s someone I\u2019m a little nervous about for the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stenhouse held on to second place, crossing the finish line 1.669 seconds behind Edwards, and took the lead in the series standings by two points over eighth-place finisher Elliott Sadler. Kyle Busch won a heated battle against polesitter Paul Menard for the third position, with Menard rolling across the stripe in fourth and Trevor Bayne fifth.<\/p>\n
To Stenhouse, whose car picked up a push after about 15 green-flag laps, the race was instructive. Going forward, Stenhouse plans to place more emphasis on practice.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re right there where we need to be\u2014we\u2019ve just got to cap it off,\u201d said Stenhouse, 23, who picked up his first Nationwide win last month at Iowa. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to get a little bit better. I think Carl\u2019s a little bit better at practice, getting his car where it needs to be.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt takes us a little bit to get it going throughout the race, so we\u2019re going to have to work on that. I think that\u2019s something I\u2019m going to have to do. It\u2019s frustrating running second, but to have Ford running 1-2 up here in Michigan is a good deal for us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Edwards had stretched his lead to one second over Stenhouse when NASCAR called a caution on Lap 93 after Aric Almirola spun in Turn 2. Mark Martin, however, was on pit road when the caution flag came out and inherited the top spot when the rest of the lead-lap cars came to the pits under caution.<\/p>\n
After the restart on Lap 101, Edwards quickly dispatched Martin, with Busch following into second position. But Stenhouse soon grabbed second from Busch and quickly tracked down Edwards, passing him for the lead on Lap 104.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BROOKLYN, Mich. \u2014 When Carl Edwards saw the Ford of Roush Fenway Racing teammate Ricky Stenhouse Jr. blow by him with 21 laps left in Saturday\u2019s Alliance Truck Parts 250, he was worried. Just as crew chief Mike Beam predicted he would, however, Edwards caught Stenhouse in the closing laps, passed his teammate on Lap […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[15775],"class_list":["post-5734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nascar","tag-nascar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5734\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newenglandracingnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}