Hlas column: Newton runner-up Carl Edwards needed no consolation this weekend

NEWTON - Carl Edwards was in a hurry to change clothes in a Roush Fenway Racing trailer Sunday afternoon at Iowa Speedway, in a hurry as usual to get from one place to the next.

But a reporter's question brought him to a temporary stop.

“Are you kidding me?” Edwards exclaimed when I asked him why he would bust his chops to get here for a NASCAR Nationwide Series race after earning $1.2 million the night before at NASCAR's Sprint All-Star Race outside of Charlotte, N.C.

“Just go to a local racetrack and ask one of those guys what they would give just to be able to race in one of these races. It would probably include some fingers and a firstborn child. I grew up dreaming about being able to race like this.”

Edwards was as good an ambassador as NASCAR could have offered Newton's track this weekend. Here are the lengths the Sprint Cup points leader went to in order to compete at both Charlotte and Iowa this weekend:

Friday night, he qualified his Cup car for Saturday night's hoop-de-do in Charlotte. Saturday morning, he rode in a Cessna Citation jet from the Concord, N.C., airport to Newton so he could to practice here for 40 minutes.

He then flew back to Concord, getting there at 5:25 p.m., Eastern time, “five or 10 minutes before the drivers' meeting started.” He won the 100-lap main event a few hours later, got his seven-figure check and a gaudy new ring that he showed off here Sunday in that trailer (“I didn't wear it during the race,” he said with a grin), and finally got to bed at 2:30 a.m.

Not many hours later, Edwards was back in the Cessna. He got to Iowa with plenty of time before the green flag dropped in the Iowa John Deere Dealers 250, and finished second in the 43-car field to teammate Ricky Stenhouse Jr. Edwards' winnings were $51,675, or about 1/23rd of what he made Saturday night.

Disoriented? Exhausted? Frazzled? Not this 31-year-old winner of 19 Sprint Cup and 32 Nationwide events. Nor was Brad Keselowski, who also ran at Charlotte the night before. He placed third here.

“It's what we do,” Edwards said. “We like racing.

“For me, it was a fun day.”

It was fun for the crowd of 37,811, too. Edwards took his first lead of the day on the 135th of the 250 laps, lost the lead and regained it four times after that, then lost it to Stenhouse for keeps on Lap 233. He finished a mere .435 seconds off the lead in a race that proved what track-designer Rusty Wallace boasts about. You can pass here. And get passed.

Now, Edwards would have been here even had he hated the track. He's under contract to race both Sprint Cup and Nationwide full-schedules for Jack Roush. But the driver brought the same ‘A' game he displayed at Charlotte 17 hours earlier. It is, as he said, what he does.

“This is my seventh year of running both,” said Edwards. “We do our best to have all the logistics in line. The hardest part is not the basic logistics of it. It's taking weather into account. The weather here (a storm Saturday afternoon) was why we needed a helicopter once we landed in Concord.”

The helicopter that picked up Edwards at the Concord airport and dropped him off at Charlotte Motor Speedway belonged to Wallace. Rusty Wallace Inc., is located in Charlotte.

Wallace has to like Edwards, given the glowing things the driver says about this speedway. “It's a near-perfect racetrack,” Edwards said.

Could it one day be a Sprint Cup venue?

“Heck yes, it could!” he replied. “This would be a great Cup racetrack.”

Then, off Edwards went to the Newton airport where his Cessna awaited. It was just a half-hour flight to his home in Columbia. Mo. He brought home a big, shiny new ring and some extra spending money.

“It was an awesome weekend,” he said. “This is as good as it gets.”