Harvick wins race, Edwards the title

Kevin Harvick won another race and runaway points leader Carl Edwards finally wrapped up his first NASCAR Busch Series championship.

Edwards, who built a lead of more than 800 points in the first half of the season, stumbled through the second half of the year before putting away the title with an 11th-place run in the O’Reilly Challenge on Saturday at Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth. He leads runner-up David Reutimann by an insurmountable 552 points with two races to go.

“I can’t tell you how exciting that is and what it means to me,” said Edwards, who has won four times this season.

Team owner Jack Roush was relieved Edwards got it done.

“The rhythms in this business will just drive you crazy,” Roush said. “We had an unbelievable start to the year and, of course, it was unbelievable and we had to give a lot of it back. It means a lot to me to see Carl win his first championship in NASCAR.”

Edwards, a Nextel Cup regular who has done double duty all season, finished third in the Busch Series as a rookie in 2005 and was runner-up to fellow Cup star Harvick last year.

For a while, it seemed as if he might blow the huge lead.

“We just had a lot of bad luck,” Edwards said. “I just couldn’t believe it. I’ll never forget Kentucky [in June]. We were dominant, a half-second faster than the field, and I had already picked who I was going to give the trophy to. We had it won and got wrecked there and it just seemed like it wouldn’t stop after that.”

For Harvick, running a limited Busch schedule this season after his runaway title in 2006, it was business as usual as he won for a series-high sixth time in 24 starts in 2007. It was his 32nd career victory, moving past Jack Ingram into second place behind Mark Martin, who has 47 wins.

Harvick beat Kyle Busch by 3.486 seconds -- most of the front straightaway on the 1.5-mile oval. Denny Hamlin finished third, followed by Clint Bowyer and Matt Kenseth. Sixth-place Brad Keselowki was the highest-finishing Busch Series regular.

Tony Stewart, who started alongside pole-winner Reutimann in the front row, had the dominant car most of the day, leading 114 of the first 129 laps. But a collision with the lapped car of Kyle Krisiloff forced him to make a long pit stop for repairs. He finished seventh.

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Nick Joanides of Woodland Hills took the lead from Tim Huddleston on Lap 91, then held off challenges by Huddleston and Kevin Callahan in the final laps to win the Hoosier Tire 100 lap Auto Club Late Model division race at Irwindale Speedway.