MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- Carl Edwards has a vision of his perfect Sprint Cup season, and it may not quite be what most outsiders think.

It doesn't involve winning a dozen races or starting out by capturing the Daytona 500 on his way to a points championship. But he does feel like it is at his fingertips.

"This season would be the perfect season if we won two races and a championship," said Edwards, "and those two races would be a Martinsville race and a road course. I think for me as a driver, those have been the two most difficult things to master."

Edwards is fifth in points in the Cup Series heading into the Goody's Fast Pain Relief 500 this Sunday at Martinsville Speedway.

He has never won at Martinsville, nor at a road course. But he has reasons to be optimistic heading into Sunday's event. He finished a career-high third at the .526-mile paper clip in his last start there this past fall. In fact, after failing to finish higher than 11th in his first seven starts at Martinsville, Edwards pieced together a pair of top-10 finishes there in 2008, finishing ninth in the spring race.

So he's starting to feel like he's getting it at the place where it proves so difficult for many talented drivers to figure out how to get around the short track consistently fast and without plowing into anyone.

"What makes this place so difficult is it's the small things -- the very tiny things -- that make you faster," Edwards said. "When you say 'it's loose in the center,' it's only loose for a second-and-a-half or even seven-tenths of a second. If you go to a place like Atlanta or California, it's a lot simpler to diagnose your car because you're sliding through 2 or 3 seconds of it being loose or tight and it's really easy to relay that to your crew chief.

"Here, it's very precise. Everything happens about twice as fast as it normally does and that's what makes it tough for me."

Edwards said that there is no substitute for the experience gained by coming to Martinsville twice a season year after year.

"Then you can finally get into a groove," he said. "Bobby Hamilton gave me some great advice here about trying to get into a groove and using all your senses to not make mistakes, and then relax. I've been working on that every time I come back."

He had struggled so mightily at the track earlier in his Cup career that he said finishing third this past fall actually felt like more.

"I felt like I won the last race," he said. "Jimmie [Johnson actually] won and I think Dale [Earnhardt] Jr. was second and we were third. But I was so pumped about that. That felt really, really good. It felt like a victory."

Edwards had plenty of those before last season was complete, winning a series-high nine races en route to finishing second in points to eventual champion Johnson. He hasn't been to Victory Lane yet this season, but said he doesn't feel like his No. 99 team is far off the winning mark.

So could this weekend possibly be the start to his vision of a perfect season? He thinks he at least has a chance.

"We just keep working on the little things here," said Edwards, who was only 29th-fastest during the only Cup practice (speeds) before Friday's rains came. "I always tell everybody that it appears like this is what I grew up racing on -- this size of race track. But a dirt track this size drives like a mile-and-a-half pavement track. Everything happens slow. There is a lot of moving around in the corner.

"This short-track pavement racing is something that I hadn't really done until I got here at this level of the sport [in 2004]. So, it's been really difficult to master. ... I'm far from a master here at Martinsville, but I have been getting better. And I feel like I'm getting better at road courses. Wins at those two places would mean the world to me."

Joe Menzer is the author of "The Great American Gamble: How the 1979 Daytona 500 Gave Birth to a NASCAR Nation." Click here to purchase.