Edwards wins fuel gamble, but comes up short at end (cont'd)

The quandary in Edwards' mind was when to flat-out go and start getting after Stewart without jeopardizing his own precarious fuel situation. Afterward, he hoped that he had played it as well as he could -- but even then, he still wasn't sure.

"I don't know about these fuel-mileage races for the fans, but my heart is in there pounding inside the race car," Edwards said. "You've got so many different things going on inside your head. It's fun to do.

"I'd be interested to see how much fuel we've got left. I'll bet we've got quite a bit. I hope we don't. I hope it's right there. I would hate to think I could have run harder and run past him."

Not only was his heart pounding, but his mind was racing as fast as the car was. Maybe even faster.

"There are a bunch of different things happening," Edwards said. "If there is a caution, now the fuel-mileage thing is out the window. So you don't want to give up a ton of positions.

"You want to run out as you go across the finish line. There's no fuel gauge. You just do it by the seat of your pants. I hope I did it right. Tony obviously did it right. In hindsight, I would push him harder and hope I just got better mileage. But man, hell, we did a good job."

Earlier in the race, a bobble on pit road caused Edwards to leave without getting both cans of fuel packed into his No. 99 Ford. As a result, on the next cycle of pit stops, he had to stop seven laps earlier than he had planned.

To his credit, Edwards did not panic. He came on his radio and told his team to keep it together, that on a big track like the 2.5-mile tri-oval at Pocono Raceway they had plenty of time left to make up whatever was lost by the miscue.

"There is a lot of race to go and there is nothing you can do about it when something like that happens," Edwards said. "I don't know what happened. They just said they didn't fill it with fuel. So I don't know if there was a problem with the equipment or if Hoss, my gas man, had his one mistake of the decade. If that's the case, that's cool.

"They don't jump down my throat when I do something wrong, so if I freak out about something I'll try not to push that little button on the steering wheel [that activates the in-car radio] when I do."

In the end, despite the disappointment of leading a race-high 103 laps -- more than half of the 200-lap event -- but not quite getting to Victory Lane, Edwards was pleased with a second-place finish that was his best of the season. It also marked his third consecutive top-10 finish, following a seventh a week earlier at Dover and a fourth in the Coca-Cola 600 at Lowe's Motor Speedway the week before that.

"If we keep running like we did [Sunday], we'll get back to winning our fair share of races," Edwards said.