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FORT WORTH, Texas — With so much conversation surrounding the Matt Kenseth/Joey Logano debacle this week, one term that continues to be thrown around is “driver code.”
Certainly a subjective concept, driver code is interpreted differently from driver to driver, a gray area not unlike baseball’s “unwritten rules.”
The complexity hasn’t cleared up much for Kenseth’s Joe Gibbs Racing teammate, Carl Edwards.
“Not really, no. I don’t know what it all means,” Edwards said Friday at Texas Motor Speedway, site of Sunday’s AAA Texas 500 (2 p.m. ET, NBC/Live Extra, PRN, SiriusXM) “… There’s so many factors in this situation with so many different things happening, it’s really difficult to line it all up and say, ‘Okay, this is why this happened and this is how to proceed going forward.’ It seems pretty complex. I’m just going to focus on my deal and we’ll move on.”
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While driver code may still not be the clearest of pictures for Edwards — or any one else on the track or around it, for that matter — he did get his first lesson in it about a decade ago from a potential future NASCAR Hall of Famer.
His hero — Mark Martin.
“Mark Martin, very early on … we were racing at Bristol in 2004 maybe or 2005, and Mark is a mentor of mine, he is one of my heroes and helped me a ton in my career and during that race he ran into the back of my car — it was all I could do to not wreck,” Edwards recalled.
“At the time, I wondered what happened and didn’t know what was going on. On Monday, I called him, ‘Hey Mark.’ He said, ‘Hey Carl.’ I said, ‘Remember that race when you ran into the back of me and I didn’t know if there was something that I needed to know there?’ He said, ‘No, for the last few races you’ve been racing me hard and I thought you were taking a little more and I just figured if that’s how you want to race, that’s how you want to race.’ I was like, ‘Whoa, no I don’t want to race like that.’ He said, ‘Okay, fine then don’t and we won’t.’ ‘Okay, cool.’ He said, ‘See you next week.’ That was it.”
Perhaps the conversation was only so cordial because, you know, they were teammates at Roush Fenway Racing at the time, but it was a significant lesson that Edwards holds true and lives by to this day, as a contender for the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup.
“Car racing … everybody drives their car and you just have to do what you think is the best and what is the right thing to do at the time and all of us have done all sorts of things. Some of them were right, some of them definitely weren’t right,” said Edwards. “You just have to go out there and race everybody the way you want to be raced. In some ways you have to demand the same in return.”