Roush duo lament pit issues

Edwards was leading the race when he pitted for the last time under caution with all other front-runners, but his stop was delayed when one of his mechanics had trouble with the lug nuts on his left-front tyre, causing him to drop from the lead down to eleventh place.

The 29-year-old lamented the mistake that probably cost him the first win of the season, but he remained philosophical on the issue, not pointing fingers at any of his crew members.

"The way this works is that I don't [need] anybody to tell me when I've done something wrong, they don't need anybody to tell them," Edwards said.

"Those guys want to win the race just as bad as I do. We're all in this together. They don't yell at me when I hit the wall, so it's not my position to be mad at them, we just have to do whatever we can to fix it.

"Hopefully, that's good enough. I think we'll get better. They can do it, they had one pit stop, we passed a ton of people and put us in a position to get the lead. I know they can do it, we just got to figure out how to do it every time."

Biffle was also affected by the same issue, which probably prevented him from contending for victory after dropping down the order, having been in the lead earlier. He said their pit troubles on Sunday at Texas were not pure bad luck but simply costly mistakes.

"It's not bad luck," said Biffle. "You know, when you leave a wheel loose or you stop on the air hose or you do something else, that's not bad luck, that's school of hard knocks, that's making a mistake. That's the way it is. We're all human and we all make mistakes.

"You make your own luck a lot of times. You get a flat tire, that's bad luck. When you have problems - when you slide over the line or it falls off the jack or you have something else - that's not necessarily bad luck. It's something wasn't done normally, it boils down to something wasn't done right or a guy made a mistake or I made a mistake.

"I say you make your own luck, and things happen."

While Biffle and Kenseth recovered from their troubled stops to finish third and fourth respectively, Edwards was unable to move up further than tenth place in the closing laps of the race.