KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- Sometimes, it seemed like they were the only cars on the racetrack.

Two vehicles, one red and one blue, with an open ribbon of asphalt extending out from either side of them. For 45 laps they circled the 1.5-mile expanse of Kansas Speedway, hunter and hunted, their own personal duel becoming representative of the larger championship quest. They led the rest of the field by more than 4 seconds. Other cars appeared on the horizon every now and then, but none of them mattered.

This was all about Carl Edwards and Jimmie Johnson.

This was the chase within the Chase.

They're not the only ones in this championship battle, mind you -- Greg Biffle would certainly have something to say about that -- but they're certainly the standards, the only drivers able to carry sustained excellence from the regular season into NASCAR's playoff without rallying in the former or falling back in the latter. What could very well be a two-man contest all the way to Homestead was crystallized on one gorgeous Sunday afternoon near the bluffs of the Missouri River, when Edwards threw everything he had at Johnson, who in turn did all he could to fend it off.

It was great theatre. And it ended with Johnson in front, and Edwards' car scraped and spent from a radical last-ditch attempt at a winning pass. It ended with the two-time defending champion back in the points lead for the first time since the last race of last year (watch video), 10 ahead of the driver fast becoming his closest rival. It ended with Edwards, likely more frustrated than he was willing to admit, lamenting a missed attempt at a first Sprint Cup victory at the racetrack just across the border from his home state.

"Man, I just wanted to win this race," he said. "I wish we could start it again right now and run it again. But it is a good points day. That's the bright side."

In a Chase with so many contenders running up front, with point gaps so narrow, a winning margin like the .280 seconds that Johnson squeaked out Sunday might very well mean the difference between a big silver trophy and a wintertime of the disappointment Edwards felt at Kansas. How close is it right now? In the final laps, Biffle charged as hard as he could to overtake Jeff Gordon -- for third place. "Coming down to Homestead, it will be five points, and I just wanted to get by him so bad," he said. Johnson, when he realized he had led the most laps, translating into five-point bonus: "Sweet!"

But the real drama was on the racetrack, and at times it was galvanizing. Edwards led Johnson during a caution that came out after Travis Kvapil pancaked the wall. The ensuing pit stop turned in by the No. 99 team was a solid one, but crew chief Bob Osborne had to hold his driver for an additional second or two because A.J. Allmendinger was pulling into the stall ahead of them. That extra beat was all Johnson, who as the pole winner had the advantage of pitting in the first pit box, needed to seize a lead he would never relinquish.

"Anytime you have to pull around a car, and you can't shoot straight out, you don't get the best exit off your box," Osborne said later, leaning against a toolbox in the teardown area, while his counterpart on the No. 48 team, Chad Knaus, celebrated in Victory Lane. "That didn't help it. Even if we had a clean stall leaving, it would be hard to say whether we'd beat the first pit box."

The showdown began in earnest on the restart with 45 laps to go. Each time around the tri-oval, Osborne radioed Edwards his lap time compared with Johnson's. The differences were only fractions, but the No. 99's were consistently lower. "Just be patient," Osborne told his driver. "It will come to you. You will run him down."

It certainly seemed that way. Little by little Edwards closed the gap, the two cars running a race of their own, the remainder of the field rendered insignificant by their dominance. The Roush Fenway team could feel it. "You're better than he is now," spotter Jason Hedlesky told Edwards. "Just pick him apart."

Except -- Edwards couldn't. Suddenly the numbers conveyed over the radio began to swing in the other direction, signifying the fact that Johnson had grown incrementally faster. "Your .80 to his .72," Osborne said with 24 laps remaining, meaning that Johnson had made the previous circuit eight-hundredths of a second faster. Edwards began moving up and down the racetrack, searching for the fastest line. Osborne's voice took on an urgent tone, but his confidence never wavered. "Come on," he told Edwards as the laps wound down. "You can do this now. Dig deep."

That's Osborne's style. Even with a handful of laps remaining and victory looking less and less likely, he stayed on message, prodding his driver to give a little bit more. "I think everybody likes to be motivated a little bit," the crew chief said afterward. "I don't think Carl really needs it, but everybody likes to hear it. It helps just a little bit. It's just the way I try to do it."

Edwards doesn't mind. "It's fine," he said. "Bob can say whatever he wants on the radio. Any time you get positive reinforcement, I think that's good. If I wanted him to be quiet, I'd just tell him to be quiet. I can just tell from his voice, it does motivate me a little bit. It's good when you know all your guys are down there cheering for you. That's a good reminder."

There was no such cheerleading on No. 48 team radio, where the words spoken were much more clinical, all completely related to the task at hand. Of course, they were also out front, and the advantage was growing, and the No. 99 car was getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror. "With two to go we had a nice, comfortable lead," Johnson said, "and I thought we were in great shape."

Not yet. Edwards, likely thinking less of the championship battle and more of winning in the region where he grew up, had one move left. As the cars took the white flag, Edwards was right on Johnson's rear bumper. Thundering onto the backstretch for the last time, the No. 99 car charged by. The tactic was desperate, and it showed when Edwards cut across the front of Johnson and roared too deep into the final turns. He bounced off the wall and cut down into the tri-oval, skirting the infield grass as Johnson took the checkered flag (watch video).

It was a breathtaking moment. Edwards thought back to his younger days and a sportsman race on a small racetrack in Summit, Mo., and how a local racer named Danny Crane had tried to slide past him in his 1978 Camaro. Crane overran the racetrack and wound up in the woods. Edwards wound up smacking the wall.

"I felt like my buddy Danny Crane [Sunday]," Edwards said. "I'm sure for a second Jimmie thought, oh, my God, he's going to win this thing. Then he went, nope, physics win again. But, you know, that's the way it goes."

Johnson, familiar with the slide move from his days racing stadium trucks, was as awestruck as everyone else. "I wanted to make sure I had the car pointed in the right way for a drag race at the start/finish line," he said. "At that time, I think Carl probably recognized what I was trying to do, and took it [into the corner] way far beyond any sense of normal thinking, and was committed to it. So I can't explain how surprised I was, and shocked. In some ways I thought it was pretty damn cool to see him bomb it in there like that and skip it off the wall, but it caught me off guard. I didn't expect him to come in there and put the slide job on me with that much conviction."

There was no shortage of conviction or effort. "That's all I had," Edwards told his team over the radio after the race. He slid out of his car, did a few media interviews (watch video), and then walked by himself down the length of pit road to where Johnson was finishing his celebratory burnout. You could see the abject disappointment in the way he hung his head. When the No. 48 car came to a stop, Edwards stuck his head inside the driver's-side window. "How far did I clear you by?" he asked Johnson.

"Seven car-lengths or so," Johnson replied.

"Dammit, I got in there too hard."

"You think?"

It was a light, almost casual moment between two drivers who had just given all they had to beat each other. No hard feelings -- too much at stake to risk that. The chase within the Chase moves on to the big, nefarious racetrack at Talladega next week.

"It probably upset some people that we didn't get out and want to fight and all those things, but you can have rivalries and still respect one another," Johnson said. "I think Carl is going to be one of the guys I have to worry about, and I'll sit there and obsess over beating that 99 ... Those things exist, but we still respect each other. I hope and do believe you will see more of that throughout the Chase. Maybe some of the hardcore fans don't like it, they want to see us all brawling out there on the frontstretch. But the guys racing out there for the championship right now, I think you're going to see just hard-nosed racing and great deal of respect for one another."

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.

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