Mike Edwards left his Coweta, Okla., home and drove his Pro Stock team hauler 2,100 miles to the Northwest Nationals at Pacific Raceways this week.

“It has 130,000 miles on it, and he has put every one of 'em on it!” wife Lisa interjected. However, it was the last half mile in his race car which made the long trip worthwhile.

Staring down a hot, tricky track with a third-place showing from Friday, Edwards needed to go back to what he knew would work at Pacific Raceway; what gave him one of his five victories last year on the way to his first Pro Stock series championship.

Mike Edwards left his Coweta, Okla., home and drove his Pro Stock team hauler 2,100 miles to the Northwest Nationals at Pacific Raceways this week.

The transporter might have over 130,000 miles on the odometer, however Mike Edwards just need one half mile to put his Pro Stock Pontiac back in the number one spot.

Staring down a hot, tricky track with a third-place showing from Friday, Edwards needed to go back to what he knew would work at Pacific Raceway; what gave him one of his five victories last year on the way to his first Pro Stock series championship.

“Yesterday we were trying a lot of things. We stepped out of the box a little bit and tried a few things and didn't really like what we saw. So we basically went back this morning to kind of how we ran the thing here last year,” the Penhall/K&N/Interstate Batteries Pontiac GXP driver said.

That worked in the third overall qualifying session early Saturday, as he nosed out Johnny Gray in the NTB Pontiac GXP by one-thousandth of a second. Edwards' 6.598-second elapsed time earn him his 10th No. 1 qualifying position in 14 races -- best in any pro class this season.

“We made a nice run. We barely inched out Johnny Gray. He made an awesome run, too.”

Gray, with a 6.599 in that same Saturday afternoon session, was the only other driver with a sub 6.6-second effort.

Edwards, who has qualified no worse than second for nearly an entire calendar year -- dating back to last July 25 at Sonoma, Calif. -- said he experimented a bit because “the conditions were favorable to what we were wanting to do for awhile. We thought the weather was going to be better this morning, so we thought yesterday's qualifying wouldn't hold up -- which it didn't. Most everybody ran a little bit quicker today. But we thought it was a good time to do it. I'm not much on doing that, but it was just the right opportunity, and I really thought it was going to work out.”