Carl Edwards faces major decision in thick of NASCAR season

Carl Edwards left California still firmly in the lead of this year’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Series standings — and with doubts still firmly in place about whether he can stay there.

That’s mainly because Edwards is now mulling whether he’ll re-sign with his team, Roush Fenway Racing, for next season or jump to another team.

Edwards said he planned to decide before the Sept. 18 start of the Cup series’ championship playoff, the 10-race Chase for the Cup.

But if Edwards opts to drive elsewhere in 2012, there were questions about whether his lame-duck status at Roush Fenway would hurt his ability to win the Chase and end Jimmie Johnson’s record streak of five consecutive Cup titles.

Edwards leads the standings by 25 points over second-place Kevin Harvick. Johnson is 33 points behind in third place as the series resumes Saturday for the summer race at Daytona International Speedway.

Before he finished third Sunday in the Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Infineon Raceway behind winner Kurt Busch and second-place finisher Jeff Gordon, Edwards said that “if it were up to me I would do [the new contract] when the season is over. That isn’t the case, though. We have to get it done.

“There is a feeling of, hey, we would like to get this done before we get into the Chase.

But he added, “I am not going to force anything or rush anything.”

There is speculation that Edwards is looking at, among other teams, Joe Gibbs Racing, where 21-year-old Joey Logano’s seat might be vulnerable because Logano is struggling in his third full season in NASCAR’s top-tier series.

Logano won the pole for Sunday’s race at Infineon and finished sixth, but he remains 23rd in the Cup standings with only one top-five finish through 16 races.

Neither Edwards nor Gibbs has confirmed that any changes are possible, and “I have heard rumors about all different teams for the last two years,” Edwards said of his contract talks.

Regardless, Edwards insisted that no matter what happens, the team that works on his No. 99 Ford won’t suffer the rest of this season.

“We will race fine as a team,” he said. “We have to stay focused on our goal, to win the championship, no matter what.”

If Edwards decided to leave Roush Fenway, that could cause a ripple effect of driver-team changes elsewhere.

Adding to the potential shuffle is Red Bull’s recent decision to sell all or part of its two-car team, for which Kasey Kahne and Brian Vickers drive.

Kahne already plans to move to Hendrick Motorsports next year to succeed veteran Mark Martin. But whether the Red Bull team continues in 2012 under new ownership is uncertain.

Edwards, 31, so far this year is fulfilling what long had been expected of the Missourian, a one-time substitute school teacher who handed out business cards in search of a stock-car ride before Roush Fenway hired him late in the 2004 season.

He has nine top-10 finishes this season, including a win at Las Vegas, and his third-place finish in Sonoma surprised even him.

Edwards, who also frequently drives in NASCAR’s second-tier Nationwide Series, had planned to fly back and forth from Sonoma to compete in Saturday’s Nationwide race at Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wis.

But that idea was scrapped so Edwards could focus on the tricky 10-turn Infineon track for the Cup race. He qualified 13th, ran poorly early on and then charged to the front in the race’s late stages.

Staying in Sonoma “was the call of the weekend,” he said. “[It] ended up giving us two hours of practice. We got to really work on the car and that’s what made this a good day. It was a great points day.”

james.peltz@latimes.com