Edwards driven by racing’s challenges
becoming the next Sam Cassell or Carmelo Anthony. He was a heck of a player, too — second-team All-Metro guard on a championship Dunbar team, starter on a junior college national champion, steady contributor at a Division I conference winner.
But as his college career at High Point neared its end, Edwards recognized the NBA was out of reach. Around the same time, he accepted a fortuitous invitation to tour the headquarters of Richard Childress Racing in nearby Welcome, N.C. Less than four years later, he spent last Sunday slapping on tires and pumping a jack for the newly minted Daytona 500 winner, Austin Dillon.
In the afterglow of victory at the Super Bowl of NASCAR, Edwards chuckles at the improbability of his career path — a black guy from Baltimore letting go of basketball to make his fortune in a sport dominated by white faces and conservative politics.
“I never wanted to do normal,” he says. “I always wanted to be different. It’s something you hear motivational speakers say: If you’re comfortable, you need to get out of your comfort zone to be successful.”
Edwards, 26, lays out the stereotype of a NASCAR pit crew member — a country boy who began fiddling with engines from the time he learned to walk.
But the sport’s leading teams have recently turned to ex-athletes in their eternal quest for the slightest edge.
Why couldn’t a guy such as Edwards use his quickness, hand-eye coordination and coolness under pressure to shave a few tenths of a second off a tire change?
It hardly matters that for him, LeBron James, and not Richard Petty, was “The King.”
“I’m going to say the mental aspect applies even more than the physical,” Edwards says. “You have to be fit to do it, but the mental side, I’d almost compare it to having to hit a free throw to win the game. Everyone’s yelling at you, wanting you to miss, and you have to have that focus.”
He describes his mindset during the final pit stop of Dillon’s victory at Daytona, a crucial moment because the team had decided to stop when most other drivers were rolling toward the finish.
“Slow is fast,” he says. “That’s all I was saying in my head. Slow will result in a clean pit stop, and clean pit stops are fast pit stops.”
It’s a mentality he learned handling the ball in high-stakes basketball games.
The refined madness of a NASCAR pit stop unfolds in about 11 seconds. In that span. Edwards leaps the wall with a tire on his arm, hangs it on the right rear of the car, then hustles around to jack up the left side of the vehicle and hangs the left rear tire. He used to be a pure jackman, but NASCAR rules reduced the size of pit crews and forced him to add tire carrying to his repertoire. To the untrained eye, a pit stop looks like an oil change on amphetamines, but Edwards says it requires the same exquisite interplay you might see from an elite basketball offense.
“It’s like a symphony,” he says. “Everyone has to be in sync. Everyone has to trust each other. Or it just won’t sound right.” fiancee, Emily Westlund, for advice on his possible career.
“Man, if a resume came across my desk that had NASCAR on it, I’m probably going to stop,” his future father-in-law told him.
That message hit home for the self-styled iconoclast. He was in.