Carl Edwards Said He Left NASCAR Because of Race Manipulation. Most Didn't Care.
What does it say about NASCAR's championship when most shrug when they "snatch" it away?
Last week, in a two-hour conversation with Dale Earnhardt Jr. on the Dale Jr. Download, Carl Edwards finally opened up a little bit.
The 2025 NASCAR Hall of Fame Inductee has only recently been making a bit of a return to the industry after his shocking exit following the 2016 season.
In what ended up being his final professional motor race to date, Edwards passed Kyle Busch for second on the track in the 2016 Ford EcoBoost 400, and first among the championship four, with 25 laps to go. Edwards would hold off Busch for a few laps before pulling away.
Edwards seemed to be in the catbird’s seat when, with 16 laps to go, Dylan Lupton had a flat left rear tire. Lupton made a great save in turn 2 and began to limp his way back to pit road on the apron.
NASCAR called the caution regardless.
Lupton did not hit the wall, nor did he hit another car. He made it to the apron and kept on rolling. Didn’t matter though.
Edwards won the race off pit road among the championship four, staying in second overall to race leader Kyle Larson.
A mistake on Busch’s pit stop relegated him to sixth on the restart, moving Joey Logano right behind Edwards in third.
On the restart, Edwards blocked Logano all the way into the inside wall, causing a major wreck that took himself and multiple other drivers out of the race.
Edwards would get out of the car. He’d apologize, then try and pump up the No. 22 team in their ultimately unsuccessful bid for the championship.
He would get cleared from the infield care unit, give an aw shucks interview to television. He would then retire in January a couple of months later. Besides a very rare cameo here and there, he then basically disappeared for six years.
Alright, so now that we’re all caught up, let’s go to the present. Or at least, well, last week. You know what I mean.
If you haven’t listened in full to the Download, I would highly recommend you do. It’s a remarkable interview and serves as a high point in the ten years the show has been on.
“I know NASCAR was throwing those cautions to make it more exciting. That’s a fact. And I specifically talked to people about it.
“And that’s that. We’re all in this sport to entertain. And they were trying their hardest at the time.”
Okay, so just to review, here is a driver outright saying that he believes a championship was manipulated for excitement. Imagine just how massive this would be in any other sport, let alone in any other racing championship.
If you follow the NFL, people will still complain about Deflategate or the sign stealing or any number of other scandals the New England Patriots had throughout their dynasty. Enough to where the league would punish the team years after Deflategate.
Imagine if it was revealed the NFL referees manipulated the result of the 2017 Super Bowl so that the Patriots had a chance to come back against the Falcons. Roger Goodell would probably be hauled in front of Congress, there would be lawsuits to reverse the result, and everything the NFL does from this point onwards would carry more scrutiny than it already does.
In October, Felipe Massa’s lawsuit attempting to void the results of the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix will go to court. That was the race in which Nelson Piquet Jr. crashed to hand the lead and the win to his Renault teammate, Fernando Alonso.
Now, when the race fixing went public in that situation, there were major repercussions for everybody involved except for Alonso, who did not know about it. It led to Renault temporarily leaving F1 for a few years, and the major figures involved in the scandal were banned “forever”.
Edwards isn’t going to sue over the 2016 championship. He seems to have put that behind him. But still, he felt comfortable enough to say the caution was called against him just for entertainment purposes.
The incredible thing about this is that NASCAR’s credibility is so shot, so thoroughly broken, that in the moments after this revelation, even Earnhardt doesn’t dispute this or offer a counterpoint.
And once the episode was posted, nobody seemed to mind it all that much. Not the episode itself, which was warmly received. But nobody seemed to engage with the content of what Edwards said.
Nobody asked a driver the next weekend “Hey, what do you think of Edwards’ allegation there?”. I couldn’t find any column from any of the major NASCAR websites going “Hey, doesn’t this look bad?”.
… Well, with one exception. I had written the vast majority of this column last week, then waited to see if the story had any legs. Anthony Damcott of Fronstretch, a former colleague of mine, wrote a piece last week on it, at damn near the exact same time and with a similar opening structure to this column originally.
Good on them for getting the memo and also screw them for making more work for me because then I had to change some things around there.
But outside of them? Not even Nick Bromberg, who is bemoaned by many of the diehards as “too negative” and always out to “get” NASCAR, bothered to note it on Twitter.
Nope, just me and Damcott all alone out here on an island. On legally distinct sides of the island, but still a small one with just two inhabitants.
Like, the NASCAR approval drama around Katherine Legge is a big story, and it is important. But you’d think a member of this year’s Hall of Fame class saying he was robbed of the 2016 championship by NASCAR in the exact same format they use now would get more screentime and column space than if Legge should have been approved to race or not.
And this isn’t a criticism of the media as much as it is an observation of just how low this series has gone in the last 20 years. We just accept that NASCAR calls cautions when they want to because they often do. Maybe a caution call will be bad enough to where some grumpy Monday morning pieces will come out criticizing it, but that’s mostly it.
NASCAR will have competition director Elton Sawyer on to talk about it on Sirius XM on Tuesday because they have to justify the further existence of that channel. But by the end of the week, we’re on to something else or more news.
Stepping out of that system, one that I was in for so many years, has really given me pause to see just how low things have gotten. Like, if Mark Martin had come out and called the 1990 championship rigged for entertainment back in the day, there would have been a firestorm. It would have been all over the NASCAR Scene and absolutely on the cover.
And the comedy of it all is, that only proves the meat of Edwards’ point.
“I wanted to win that championship. It’s everything I worked for.
“That’s it, that’s the prize you want more than anything in the world. And, yes, I believe, that was snatched. And I had to look and say, okay, let’s go to 2017.
“Let me be real smart, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go, and I’m going to continue to put everything in my life second, start at Daytona, and I’m going to drive the hell out of this race car like I’ve been doing for 13, 14 years.
“And I’m going to run this thing all to the end. And give everything I got, another year of my life […] then I’m going to get to Homestead at the end of 2017, I’m going to do everything just right, and they’re going to throw a caution with five [laps] to go. And we’re going to put this all on a restart?
“And I thought ‘Damn, I’m going to spend a whole year of my life, all the things you give up and possibly give up, for one restart?’ […] It was really disappointing, but it actually helped me to say hey, this is the reality and is it worth it to you?”
Is it worth it to anybody? Is it worth it to the drivers? Is it worth it to the viewers? What is the point of NASCAR having a championship that means anything if everybody just accepts that they can take it away at a moment’s notice?
This was something that drove me to get away from full-time NASCAR coverage after 2021 and instead refocus and reinvent myself with F1. Another big part of that was the FIA’s response to the F1 championship that season.
No, I don’t think that championship was stolen from Lewis Hamilton nor that it’s an illegitimate championship for Max Verstappen. But I also disagree with the calls the race director made at the time, as did so many other people.
The FIA then, instead of just sitting around all winter and not doing anything, made sweeping changes to race directing and stewarding. There have been bad calls since and plenty of other disagreements, but I can confidently say the FIA have not put entertainment over sportsmanship nor safety in the three years since.
I don’t feel like I’ve wasted my time being actively engaged in the championship in F1 as I have for many years with NASCAR, even in spite of the Verstappen domination. I’d much rather have that than a championship that not only doesn’t matter, but one that everybody apparently agrees does not matter.