Edwards rules the day after

The few thousand NASCAR fans who braved hours of rain delays Sunday night in hope of seeing the Auto Club 500 completed in Fontana weren’t the only ones disappointed when the race’s finish was postponed until Monday.

So was Carl Edwards. After only 87 of the race’s 250 laps were completed Sunday, the Sprint Cup driver told anyone who would listen that his No. 99 Ford Fusion was the fastest car circling the two-mile Auto Club Speedway. On Sunday night, he said, “I told my guys that we’ve got them right where want them.”

Once the race resumed Monday, Edwards’ car, prepared by Roush Fenway Racing, looked as if it were on a speed rail as he charged past Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon, Hendrick Motorsports teammates, in the closing laps to win the second race of the Cup season.

The win was the eighth Cup victory of Edwards’ career and his first since winning at Dover (Del.) International Speedway in September.

“It feels good to be in Victory Lane,” Edwards, 28, said after doing a back flip from the window frame of his car, his signature postscript after winning a race. “That was a lot of fun racing with [Johnson and Gordon].”

Johnson and Gordon were second and third, respectively, and Kyle Busch of Joe Gibbs Racing was fourth. Busch, in a Toyota Camry, also took the early points lead in the series.

Edwards, a Missouri native who once taught school part time before landing a full-time Cup job with Roush in 2004, clearly had the strongest car with 30 laps remaining and held a six-second lead over Johnson.

A caution period then prompted the leaders to pit, and the Chevrolets of Johnson and Gordon came out of the pits ahead of Edwards.

But Edwards ran down both of them for his first victory at the Fontana track, which changed its name last week from California Speedway.

Edwards said it helped that the handling was going away on Johnson’s car because it “would have been really, really tough to get by him if he wasn’t so loose.”

But Gordon, a three-time winner at Fontana, said “nobody was going to beat the 99 today.”

Even so, the race provided a strong comeback for Johnson, who has won the last two Cup titles, and four-time champion Gordon after they started the season poorly a week earlier in the Daytona 500. Johnson finished 27th and Gordon 39th in that race.

“Coming out of Daytona with a rough finish, we definitely were hoping to get a solid one here today and we did,” Gordon said.

Gordon’s engine blew on the final lap, but he still managed to finish third because the lap was run under caution after Dale Jarrett skimmed the wall.

Johnson and Gordon started the race 1-2 because qualifying was rained out Friday, and the starting order was based on last year’s final points.

Edwards’ win helped Roush Fenway extend its strong record in Fontana. His teammate, Matt Kenseth, had won the last two Auto Club 500s, and the team’s Greg Biffle won in 2005. Kenseth and Biffle finished fifth and 15th, respectively, Monday.

Minutes after winning the race, Edwards was back on the track driving in a second race held Monday, the Stater Bros. 300 in NASCAR’s second-tier Nationwide Series. That race, originally scheduled for Saturday, also had to be postponed over the weekend because of rain.

Edwards finished fifth in that event. One of several Cup drivers who also compete in the Nationwide Series, Edwards is the series’ defending champion.

NASCAR estimated that 25,000 spectators returned Monday to see the Cup race, which ended in controversy nearly 24 hours after its scheduled start because of rain delays.

The race’s start was delayed for more than two hours Sunday. Within the first 20 laps, several drivers, including Dale Earnhardt Jr., Casey Mears and Denny Hamlin, were involved in crashes that they blamed on wet spots on the track. Earnhardt and Hamlin chastised NASCAR for starting the race too early, before all the wet spots were dry, and some other drivers echoed their concerns.

After their wrecks, NASCAR stopped the race and spent more than an hour further drying the track. Racing resumed, but heavy rain fell again after 87 laps, stopping the race once more.

NASCAR kept drying the track until 11 p.m., but finally gave up and rescheduled the event for Monday morning.

Edwards said he didn’t mind the delays. “I’d like to think it really didn’t matter if we raced last night or today,” he said. “Our car was great.”

james.peltz@latimes.com