Notes: Sadler impressed with LVMS safety upgrades

LAS VEGAS -- Elliott Sadler, currently 11th in the Sprint Cup Series championship standings, commended Las Vegas Motor Speedway for adding SAFER barriers to the inside wall on the backstretch, a response to the violet wreck Jeff Gordon suffered last year.

Sadler also is a firm believer that other tracks should follow suit.

"You hear all these owners of tracks spending all this money all the time to get a [Cup] date, so they must have money lying around somewhere," Sadler said. "I think to have a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series date, you should have soft walls all the way around the outside or inside of your race track. I know that it costs a lot [of money], but a lot of fans show up to watch us race every week. That's my opinion. There are some tracks that we could do better at."

Edwards focuses on Sunday's race

Edwards

Defending race winner Carl Edwards wasn't elated with his 16th-place qualifying run on Friday, but he wasn't overly disappointed either. Edwards is convinced he has something in reserve for Sunday's Shelby 427 Cup race.

"It's not where we wanted to be, because I thought we could be faster, but there is more in the car," said Edwards, who will try to give owner Jack Roush his seventh win in 12 Cup starts at Las Vegas.

Johnson explains Fontana fade

Three-time defending Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson said the "feel" of his No. 48 Chevrolet betrayed him last Sunday at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, Calif.

Johnson, who started second in the Auto Club 500, dominated the first green-flag run but faded to a ninth-place finish late in the race.

At least he avoided the engine failures that knocked out his Hendrick Motorsports teammates, Mark Martin and Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Johnson

"At the start of the race, the car was really good, but tight," Johnson said. "As we tried to help the car, we actually kept making it tighter. Looking back on it, I really felt like the splitter was on the ground. So we made adjustments to help the front travel of the car to get the splitter off the ground, and it just made the car worse. Come to find out after looking at our travels afterwards, the splitter wasn't on the ground.

"So I kind of steered us in the wrong direction there. We kind of missed it a little bit there and tuned ourselves out, which is not common for the No. 48 car, but you live and learn, and we have a better idea of what to do this week."

Johnson said his teammates' engine failures were attributable to a defective batch of valve springs. Those particular springs were used only in the cars of Earnhardt and Martin, not in the Chevys driven by Johnson, teammate Jeff Gordon and those of Stewart-Haas Racing, which is supplied by Hendrick Motorsports.

"We were fortunate on that front," Johnson said. "It appears that a batch of valve springs got our other two cars, and they literally broke on the same lap. Fortunately, my car and Jeff's car didn't have those in them or the No. 39 [Ryan Newman] or the No. 14 [Tony Stewart], and we made it through."