LONG POND, Pa. -- As the long race that is the Pocono 500 rolled toward its conclusion Sunday at Pocono Raceway, Carl Edwards wanted to know only one thing from his crew chief, Bob Osborne.

Was he going to make it to the finish, or run out of gas?

As fine a crew chief as Osborne is, he couldn't give Edwards a straight answer.

Press Pass: Edwards

After a strong run in the Pocono 500, Carl Edwards is dissapointed that his team could not come away with the win.

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"He would tell me the best-case scenario was that we were going to be this many laps short, and the worst-case scenario we'd be this many short," Edwards said. "And I would be like, 'Well, which scenario is it?' Either way, it was like we were going to be short."

So Edwards took to conserving fuel as much as he could over the final laps, until time was running out to make a run at race leader Tony Stewart. Then, with one lap left, Edwards cut loose and went after him.

It was too late. Stewart ended up holding him off and going to Victory Lane, while Edwards had to settle for second.

Edwards, who scored a Sprint Cup Series-high nine victories last season, has yet to win in 14 races this season. But when Jimmie Johnson ran out of fuel after getting side-by-side with him on the final lap, Edwards had a fleeting hope that Stewart was going to be the next one to come up short.

"Whatever he was doing worked. I didn't think he was going to make it, but Tony did a really good job," Edwards said. "I really didn't believe he was going to make it. I thought he was going to run out. Our fuel mileage was really good. I feel like we've got the best in the field with our Ford Fusion.

"Jimmie ran out when I thought he was going to run out and Tony just didn't."

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.