AVONDALE, Ariz. -- The desert winds whipped all around as Bob Osborne, crew chief for the No. 99 Ford driven by Carl Edwards, walked through the garage area Sunday night following the Checker O'Reilly Auto Parts 500 at Phoenix International Raceway.

“

It's possible. Not real probable, but possible. But I guarantee you that's not going to change the way we do business. Congratulations to Jimmie and those guys. They're making this really tough.

”

-- CARL EDWARDS

Despite the rapidly dropping temperatures that accompanied the high winds, Osborne's face was beaded with sweat. It had been a long night.

Yet Osborne refused to be anything but upbeat after a fourth-place finish by the No. 99 left him and Edwards 141 points behind race winner and point leader Jimmie Johnson in the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship. With only next Sunday's race at Homestead remaining, Osborne acknowledged that the deficit will be nearly impossible to overcome.

Johnson needs only to finish 36th or better in the race, and that's if Edwards wins the race and leads the most laps.

"We're going to have to rely on the 48 to have a catastrophe for us to even have a shot to win the championship," Osborne said. "And on top of that, we would have to win the race -- which we all know how difficult that is. But that's what we've got to try to do and that's what we're going to try to do. Then whatever outcome the 48 has, that's what it has."

A glimmer of hope flashed into the heads of the No. 99 team after Edwards drove to consecutive victories at Atlanta and Texas heading into Sunday's shootout at Phoenix -- especially when the usually unflappable No. 48 team of Johnson and crew chief Chad Knaus struggled to an uncharacteristic 15th-place finish in Texas.

Once they arrived in the Arizona desert and Sunday's race began, those hopes rapidly evaporated like a mirage. Johnson led a race-high 217 laps -- and as hard as Edwards dug all day, that was 217 more than the No. 99 led.

"It was close. We could've won the thing; that would have been better," Edwards said. "But Jimmie's doing a great job. If he would have some real terrible luck in Homestead, we still have a chance. But they did their jobs [Sunday]. We did the best we could, too. It's just too big of a spread right now."

Osborne added: "You know, we did the best we could. We knew the 48 would be strong here, and they just beat us. They were stronger than we were."

Johnson has only one finish of worse than 36th this season, having finished 39th when his engine blew after he led 35 laps in the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte last May. So something bad like that theoretically could happen, but it obviously isn't very likely for the usually smooth-running No. 48 team that is in line to become the first in 30 years to win three consecutive championships.

"It's possible. Not real probable, but possible," Edwards said. "But I guarantee you that's not going to change the way we do business. We're going to go to Homestead with everything we've got and be aggressive and try to win the race. Mile-and-a-halves have been our best tracks lately, and I just wish we could have run a little better here.

"We ran pretty well; we just didn't have enough time. We kept barely marching forward. Congratulations to Jimmie and those guys. They're making this really tough."

Osborne said they expected to receive Johnson's best shot Sunday after the struggles the No. 48 experienced one week earlier in Texas.

"You never know what's going to happen in this sport -- but you know they're not likely to have issues two weeks in a row," Osborne said. "It can happen. But you can't count on it. You've just got to do your business, do your absolute best on your end, and whatever runs through their program runs through their program."

Once Sunday's race began, it didn't take Osborne and Edwards and everyone else in attendance at PIR long to understand that Johnson's No. 48 car was the class of the 43-car field. As the race moved into its latter stages, and Johnson already had locked up the most laps led for the day and the five bonus points that went with it, the No. 99 team just focused on minimizing the points' hit as much as it could.

"The best case scenario we had was to leave here even in points," Osborne said. "Because as strong as he was running -- knowing he was going to lead the most laps -- he would have had to fallen to third and we would have had to have won the race to even come out of here even to what we were after last week [106 points behind]. We knew that wasn't going to happen. So at some point we just knew we had to settle in and just get as many points as we could to keep it as close as we could going into Homestead."

They did that, but it still looks grim. By the time it came to the end of Sunday's race, Edwards had only one last hope on the final green-white-checkered restart.

"I was just hoping Jimmie had forgotten how to shift gears or something," he joked.

Of course, the two-time defending champion didn't. So now, if the Fat Lady isn't already singing on this Sprint Cup season, Osborne and Edwards certainly can hear her tuning up just off-stage.

Regardless of what happens next, Osborne declared this season a grand success for the No. 99 team. Edwards remains tied with Kyle Busch with a Sprint Cup Series-high eight race wins, one more than Johnson, who notched his seventh Sunday.

"We can't knock the outcome here. We've had a great season," Osborne said. "Hopefully we can go win Homestead and have the most wins of the season, the most top-fives, the most top-10s of anybody. It would be great to end on that, too, even if the 48 has a good race, too.

"We can't complain. We'd like to be the champions, sure. But you can't knock the year we've had."