Whole lotta coastin' goin' on

            HOMESTEAD, Fla. - The final race of the Sprint Cup season may as well have been the season itself.

            Carl Edwards, who won the most races, won this one, and Jimmie Johnson, who only had to finish 36^th in the Ford 400 to win the championship, finished 15^th.

            Predictable? Uh, yes. Fitting? Vividly. Exciting? Thanks to an uncertain fuel supply - sound familiar? - yes.

            Two missteps in the Chase for the Sprint Cup - a wreck he caused at Talladega and a mysterious part failure at Lowe's Motor Speedway - cost Edwards a shot. Johnson won the championship for the third year in a row. The margin was 69 points. If there had been no Chase, assuming results to have been the same, Johnson's margin would've have been 13.

            As was the case two weeks earlier in Texas, Edwards defied the belief of most of his peers by managing to get to the finish on a tank of fuel that wouldn't take anyone else as far. The No. 99 Ford made it 67 laps, or 100.5 miles, although that required coasting across the finish line.

            The ability of Edwards to stretch his fuel mystified teammates Jamie McMurray, who finished third, and Matt Kenseth, who ran out of gas while leading Edwards with under four laps to go.

            Asked to explain it, Edwards took the tack that only he would. He suggested that, wonder of wonders, a street car taught him the knack. Edwards told of how he'd learned to drive from his home in Columbia, Mo., to the Charlotte area with one stop for gas.

            "It'd be 20 miles short if you did it like you wanted," he said, "but I learned how to make it all the way on one stop. It's just how I drive."

            Edwards, 29, also observed that the race's pace car had been a Ford Fusion hybrid that isn't even on the market yet.

"A hybrid paced the field," he said, proving he could also get mileage out of public relations, "and a Ford won it with fuel mileage."

But Edwards wasn't so confident - he made it 103.5 miles two weeks earlier at Texas Motor Speedway - when teammate Kenseth's Ford ran out of fuel in front of him.

Crew chief Bob Osborne was frantically warning Edwards, who was reeling in Kenseth, to slow down.

"When Matt (Kenseth) ran out, I thought, ‘man, I have screwed this up big-time,'" admitted Edwards.

            Again paralleling the Texas triumph, Edwards proved he could be fast as well as thrifty. He led more laps - 157 out of 267 - than anyone else.

            For all Edwards' unprecedented accomplishments during the season, he still fell short. He was runner-up, an advancement of one from his third-place finish in 2005, his first full season and Tony Stewart's more recent championship year.

            And the soaring Johnson dropped his modest bearing enough to entertain the notion of winning next year what no one has: four in a row.

            Crew chief Chad Knaus made Johnson blush.

            "In my eyes," said Knaus of his driver, "he's the best there's ever been."

            You can reach Monte Dutton at mdutton@gastongazette.com.