Another victory for Edwards

As his interim crew chief headed toward inspection, Carl Edwards offered to lend him cash to bribe NASCAR’s officials.

Of course, Edwards was joking. But in making light of the severe penalties his team drew when its race-winning car failed inspection last month, Edwards showed his Roush Fenway Racing team has solidly bounced back from the Las Vegas disaster.

Edwards raced to his Sprint Cup series-best third win of the season Sunday, holding off Jimmie Johnson on a two-lap overtime sprint to the finish to win the Samsung 500 at Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth.

It backed Edwards’ declaration four weeks ago that his team would survive the 100- point deduction and six-race suspension of crew chief Bob Osborne that stemmed from a missing lid on the oil tank after the Vegas victory.

“It doesn’t matter if we get penalized. We might get a 100-point penalty for something today,” Edwards said. “It’s not going to change what I do. I’m just going to do the best I can, and our cars are really good. It does feel good to look in there and see the oil tank cover on the car, that’s good.

“But this is what we do. We go out and try to win. The other stuff doesn’t matter.”

That was evident as Edwards dominated Sunday, leading a race-high 123 laps while continuing to be the driver to beat at NASCAR’s intermediate tracks. He won at California and Vegas, and might have won in Atlanta if his motor hadn’t failed while he was leading.

“He probably could have led however many laps there were today,” third-place finisher Kyle Busch said. “He just didn’t show his full hand. We knew he was pretty good.”

Edwards didn’t dispute it, either. He nearly won the pole, settling for second when Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s late attempt nudged him to the second starting position, then paced both of Saturday’s final practice sessions to cement himself as the driver to beat.

Then he toyed with the competition, building a lead of more than seven seconds before a pair of late cautions gave Johnson and Busch two final chances to catch him. They never came close, as Edwards pulled away on the restarts and never looked back.

Johnson was second as Hendrick Motorsports remained winless through the first seven races of the season.

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Teenager Graham Rahal survived a spinout and came back to win in his first IRL IndyCar Series start, holding off veteran Helio Castroneves to win the Honda Grand Prix at St. Petersburg, Fla., and become the youngest winner in major open-wheel history.

The victory by the son of longtime open-wheel star Bobby Rahal also was a crowning moment for the former Champ Car World Series teams that only last month became part of a unified American open-wheel series under the IRL banner.

At 19 years 93 days, Rahal broke the age record set two years ago in Sonoma, Calif., by another driver from a racing family, Marco Andretti, who was 19 years 167 days old.

With his father, co-owner of the rival Rahal Letterman Racing team, watching from the top of his team’s pit box, the younger Rahal, the top rookie in Champ Car in 2007, took the lead by passing Ryan Hunter-Reay, his father’s driver, on a restart on the 65th of 83 laps.

The race was slowed by periods of rain and cut short of its scheduled 100 laps by a two-hour time limit.

Polewinner Tony Kanaan, a former IRL champion, finished third, followed by Ernesto Viso and Enrique Bernoldi.

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Ferrari’s Felipe Massa jump-started his struggling Formula One campaign by winning the Bahrain Grand Prix, his first victory of the season.

Massa moved ahead of pole-sitter Robert Kubica of BMW Sauber at the start and then held off teammate and overall leader Kimi Raikkonen to win by 3.339 seconds at Sakhir.

Kubica, second at the Malaysian GP two weeks ago, finished third ahead of teammate Nick Heidfeld as BMW Sauber filled out the second row.