Edwards, Kenseth drama ends with top-fives at AMS

HAMPTON, Ga. -- The green-white-checkered finish in Sunday's Pep Boys Auto 500 had the potential to add an intriguing postscript to last week's confrontation between Carl Edwards and Matt Kenseth.

However, once Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s wheel came loose, sending him into the wall and ending the race, Edwards and Kenseth gladly accepted their top-five finishes without further ado (watch video).

Lap-by-Lap: Atlanta

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• Lap-by-Lap, click here
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That closes the book -- for now -- on a week of unwanted media attention for the Roush Fenway Racing teammates, touched off when Edwards confronted Kenseth during a post-race television interview last Sunday. The two -- as did many others in the garage area -- expressed their opinions on the issue, with questions about team unity and relationships within the organization coming to the forefront.

But on Sunday, it was all about the racing.

"I'm just excited that we ended up second," Edwards said. "I wish it would have gone a couple of laps. I think we would have had an awesome race with Dale and Jimmie [Johnson]. That was gonna be a lot of fun and Matt had four tires and he was right there, so it would have been a heck of a race."

"We had a good car all day," Kenseth added. "We had probably a top-seven or eight car and then at the end [the team] made the right adjustments and we actually had a car that could win, but it just didn't work out with the cautions."

Kenseth was chasing down leader Kyle Busch with fewer than 15 laps to go, closing from more than a second behind to the rear bumper of Busch's car at one point. But fuel economy was the bigger issue.

"Yeah, I guess we were a little short, but we were both slowing down a lot so I don't know if we would have made it or not," Kenseth said. "It would have been kind of fun to find out. If we made it, it would have been fun to find out. If we didn't, it wouldn't have been, but we had a pretty good car."

That strategy went out the window on Lap 319 when Johnny Sauter blew a right front tire and smacked the wall. While Kenseth and most of the leaders ducked onto pit road for four tires and fuel, several others -- including Edwards -- opted for two.

"A caution 20 laps from the end, I think, would have been good," Kenseth said. "Everybody would have got four and we would have been up there and had a shot, but just the way it worked out with all that craziness, we didn't really have a chance to do anything."

Denny Hamlin stayed out, hoping to stretch his mileage, with Edwards sixth and Kenseth eighth. But on the restart, Hamlin's car failed to respond, leaving the rest of the field to take evasive action.

"I thought, 'Man, Denny is waiting an awful long time to get going here,' and then everybody started checking up," Edwards said. "Just like everybody, I've trained myself not to turn under people on those restarts. It's so hard to not turn under him, but finally I was like, 'I'm gonna run into Reed [Sorenson] or somebody,' and I just turned left and then I realized they hadn't thrown the yellow yet, so I just stood on the gas. I didn't know what was going on."

That gave Edwards, now second, one last shot at Johnson, with Kenseth seventh in the order. But that went poof the moment Junior crashed.

"I'm real grateful for how today ended up," Edwards said. "Overall, it was just a good day for us, but, yeah I am grateful. In a lot of ways, we didn't deserve to run second today with the way we performed, so it was a great day for us."