Weekend That Was: MIS (cont'd)

Owning up

You can say that car owner Jack Roush sometimes has a tendency to whine about stuff, and that wouldn't be inaccurate. But you then also would have to admit that at least he tries to take the blame himself when calls his racing operation makes don't work out.

All five of Carl Edwards' victories in the Nextel Cup Series have come with Bob Osborne as the crew chief.

Carl Edwards (Cup wins)

Year	Track	Start	Led
March 2005	Atlanta	4	9
June 2005	Pocono	29	46
Oct. 2005	Atlanta	2	115
Nov. 2005	Texas	30	82
June 2007	Michigan	12	63

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Like changing crew chiefs last year for Edwards. After Edwards won four times during his first full-time Cup season in 2005, Roush decided the driver could fare even better with Wally Brown at the helm of the team. It didn't work out, as Edwards failed to win a single race with Brown as his crew chief.

Osborne was re-installed as Edwards' crew chief prior to this season.

"Carl and Bob won four races the first year -- and of course I put my oar in and changed the thing last year and it didn't work out," Roush said. "I was surprised it took this long to get it going this year."

Second-half studs

Greg Zipadelli, Stewart's crew chief, said that he cannot offer a concrete explanation for why Stewart seems to win more races in the second halves of seasons. He said he just hopes it holds true again this season.

"I don't know. We just seem to have good racecars and just shoot ourselves in the foot, or we just have stupid luck," Zipadelli said. "Hopefully we get it out of our way and out of our system right now, and then in the second half when it really counts we can get ourselves locked into the top 12, we can go racing and just worry about a championship."

New definition

Of course, the definition of the second half of a season has changed with the advent of the Chase for the Nextel Cup. Zipadelli talked after Michigan like he's already in the second half of the season -- and on one hand, he technically is. The regular season ends after 26 races now, and then the Chase, or Cup's version of the playoffs, begin.

It could be argued, with Stewart as a model, that drivers who make the Chase do more to protect their points positions than go for wins once the Chase commences -- and that drivers who don't make the Chase obviously are free to take more chances to try and win races in the final 10 events.

Last year Stewart won five times -- twice in the first 17 races and three times in the last eight when he already had been eliminated from the Chase. The previous year, when Stewart not only made the Chase but ended up capturing the championship, he definitely heated up with the summer months. His first win that year didn't come until at Sonoma on June 26, but he won the next week at Daytona as well and then won three more (in a stretch of four races) as July stretched into August. Once he was in the Chase, though, he didn't win again.

Pit stops

• Sunday's race was the 100th of Edwards' Cup career, which began with a race at Michigan in 2004.

• Edwards led 96 of the first 156 laps of the Busch race at Kentucky on Saturday, but his evening changed dramatically after a yellow caution flag came out for debris on Lap 152 -- shortly after Edwards had stretched his lead to what seemed an insurmountable 10 seconds. On the restart, Edwards was hit from behind and wrecked by Steven Wallace. He ended up finishing 33rd, but still has a commanding stranglehold on the lead in the Busch point standings.

• They say Michigan is a Ford track, and the weekend that was did nothing to disprove that theory. In addition to Edwards capturing the Cup race, fellow Ford and Roush Fenway Racing driver Travis Kvapil won the Truck Series race at MIS on Saturday. In fact, Busch Series winner Stephen Leicht made it a clean sweep for Ford on the weekend, although his win came at Kentucky Speedway.

• No offense to obviously the class of Nextel Cup operations these days, but wasn't it kind of nice not to have to talk about Hendrick Motorsports much for at least one day?

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.