Carl Edwards reveals why he left Roush Fenway Racing before 2015 NASCAR season

Carl Edwards enjoyed immense success in the NASCAR Cup Series with Roush Fenway Racing from 2004 to 2014. Then, he decided to move to Joe Gibbs Racing, where he drove until his retirement at the end of the 2016 campaign.

It wasn’t easy for Edwards to move on from Roush, where he spent over a decade. Speaking with Dale Earnhardt Jr. on the latest episode of the Dale Jr. Download, the 28-time Cup Series winner spoke on what it was like racing for Jack Roush’s team, and how the “Cat in the Hat” operated.

“When I got to Roush, I mean — Jack is hard. I mean, he would say it how it is,” Edwards pointed out. “I remember I screwed up at Talladega one time. Ruined everything. He called me in for a meeting. I thought we were gonna talk about how we get back on track. He called me into a meeting just to tell me, ‘Carl, I don’t think you understand how bad you screwed this up.’ He went down a list. But for me, that was fine, because Jack was there to win.

“He had grown up basically dirt-floor poor. Fought his way through every single thing. That’s who he is. He doesn’t look at the world like, ‘How are we gonna feel good about where we’re at?’ He says, ‘Hey, how are we gonna fight to get where we wanna go?’ So, I know it rubbed people the wrong way.

“I remember people at the shop, they’d be, you know, just griping and moaning about something. I thought, ‘You guys, we’re racing fast race cars and that paycheck comes every two weeks. I mean, this — we’re perfect. Like, quit complaining.’ I think he just rubbed people the wrong way because of how hardcore he is.

“I felt like at the end of the day, leaving Roush for me was as simple as we just — I’ve never really talked about this, but it was just the cars. We couldn’t get them to turn in the center of the corner. I mean, we just could not get the cars to do what we needed to do. We did that for a long time. I thought, you know — I just wanted to try something different. So then we moved to Gibbs.”

Carl Edwards on Roush Fenway Racing, Joe Gibbs Racing: ‘Completely different culture’

After moving on from Roush and heading to Gibbs in 2015, Edwards noticed a completely different culture between the two organizations. Still, they were successful in their own ways, even if the contrast blew his mind.

“Completely different culture. It’s interesting how two cultures that different can both be so successful,” Edwards added, regarding the stark variability between the two teams. “Jack Roush … anybody who’s been around Jack knows that he can build the shop. He can build the car. He can drive the car. He can build the airplanes. He can fly the airplanes. He can tune the carburetor. He can build the pistons. I mean, he can take a camshaft out of a piece of metal. He can do anything, and that’s how he’s built. He’s gonna master every single piece and he had his hand in every single thing.

“Have you’ve ever seen Jack in a meeting screaming about lug nuts and stuff? I mean, it’s awesome. This guy knows what’s up. Then, you move to Joe Gibbs Racing and it blew my mind. Completely different. I remember Coach came to one of our first meetings and we’re going around the table. He would come and sit — everybody sits around. Drivers, engineers, crew chiefs. I can’t remember if engineers were there. Definitely the head engineering guys at the shop.

“He goes around and says, basically, ‘Why didn’t you win?’ Then, he’d just say, ‘Okay, cool. You didn’t win because of this? I don’t know anything about that.’ I remember one time he said something like, ‘I don’t know anything about tires. I don’t get it. I don’t know. I don’t need to know. You tell me what I need to do so that you can make these tires work the way you need them to work.’

“He gave up all the control and put it in the hands of others and then let them kind of run the ship. He just facilitated it, where Jack could really run everything himself. He was like the central computer, the actual mechanical brain behind everything, and it totally different.”

Edwards only spent two seasons at JGR, retiring after the 2016 championship was controversially taken away from him in the final laps. If he opted to stay with the team, there’s no telling how high he could’ve climbed — he won five races in three seasons, and was operating at the top of his game. Still, he ended up in the NASCAR Hall of Fame, so there can’t be too much complaining.

All told, Carl Edwards is one of the best drivers to get behind the wheel in recent memory, and he was lucky enough to drive for two icons in NASCAR. It’s certainly fascinating to hear him shed some light on how they operated behind the scenes.