Harvick’s good fortune started on Lap 396, in the scheduled 400-lap race, when he sped away from pit lane on new tires. In front of him ran three drivers who had decided not to pit after the eleventh caution of the day in the closing laps of the
Toyota Owners 400. That yellow-flag pushed the race beyond its scheduled distance and brought about a
green-white-checker finish. At the end of the race, Harvick praised his team for deciding to take on new tires.
“We’ve been on the wrong side of those decisions a few times this year,” the race winner said. “I drove it in there, hoped for the best. It all worked out.”
Harvick was sitting seventh as the field prepared to go back to green-flag racing. He says while other drivers seemed to sputter on the restart, his car “launched.”
“I just shifted gears, hit the pedal and hoped for the best,” he said. “The seas kind of parted there. They all went high and I went low.”
Harvick added that though only nine races into the 2013 NASCAR
Sprint Cup Series season, the lack of positive results wears on everyone on the team.
“We’ve had the speed and we were frustrated,” he said. “You can talk until you’re blue in the face that your car is running good. I think a win goes a long ways.”
Clint Bowyer led the field for 113 of the race total 406 laps, but at the end of the day that means little in auto racing unless you lead the final lap. The second-place finisher admitted he couldn’t keep pace with Harvick, though he finished just one-third of a second behind the race winner.
“We had a good car, we just didn’t have a great car,” Bowyer said. “The thing had a tremendous amount of drive in it and it seemed like I couldn’t get the car to turn and rotate on the throttle quite good enough.”
Joey Logano finished third and saluted his team for taking a “20th-place car at one point and got it back into the Top 10.”
Jimmie Johnson extends his lead in the
Sprint Cup Series. He is 43 points ahead of
Carl Edwards and 46 up on
Kasey Kahne.
The
Aaron’s 499 at the Talladega Superspeedway, in Alabama, is the next race on the NASCAR
Sprint Cup schedule on May 5.
