Photo Credit: Justin McFarland
As NASCAR heads to Talladega Superspeedway which is a restrictor plate race teams will have to work together to bump draft. Toyota worked well together during the Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway in having five of their drivers up front all race wrong.
Now, people are wondering how well they will work together at Dega. Carl Edwards, driver of the No. 19 XFINITY/Arris Toyota seems to think that they will.
“Man, I haven’t thought about that,” Edwards said. “We haven’t sat down and worked on our strategy but I can tell you this, Toyota teams really led by Denny (Hamlin), we worked well together. It was something like I’ve never been a part of. I don’t know if that same type of thing will work at Talladega but it’d be hard not to try. We’ve got a really good group that understands what teamwork is”
Edwards has wins at both Bristol Motor Speedway as well as Richmond International Raceway so he is locked into the chase. He and his team are still going to go into the rest of the races until the chase with the goal to win.
“If there’s a plan I don’t know it yet,” Edwards said. “We haven’t sat down and said, ‘Hey, now we can change this.’ But, we did talk a little bit this week and I mean our plan is still to come here and to win the race and to do all of the things we were going to do before we got the win but it just feels like some pressure is off and is a little more relaxed. I can already tell just with the changes Dave (Rogers, crew chief) made in practice and the way he approached practice he’s able to roll the dice a little more and not worry about making a mistake. When you’re racing for points when you don’t have the win you are racing for points and when you’re doing that you have to just be careful and now we get to really just go have fun. I mean, it’s Saturday night – or Sunday afternoon racing for us and we’re going to have some fun with it.”
Dover International Speedway is one of the races they race at in the beginning of the season as well as towards the end and part of the chase. Teams have used spring races at tracks to test for fall races in the past, and Edwards looks to be no different this year.
“Yes, now our focus is winning that championship so if there’s anything we can do to try to prepare ourselves for the championship better by trying different strategies or trying different setups or restart gears or whatever we can do we will try it,” Edwards said. “But, we’re never going to pass up a chance to go out and win races and Dover is one of my favorite race tracks so hopefully we can just go there figure out how to win both of them.”
