A Cut Above The Rest - Harvick is Happy At New Hampshire
Last week, Kevin Harvick was trapped a lap down at Chicagoland Speedway and finished 20th, falling out of the top 12 in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup standings.'
Last year, Harvick crashed at Chicagoland and ran out of fuel while leading at New Hampshire and faced a must win at Dover to advance in the chase.
Well, in the last hour Kevin Harvick got the monkey off his back, a weight lifted off of his shoulders, and a win in the bank at The Magic Mile to advance in the next round of 12. Harvick has not won at Loudon since 2006.
After a restart with just 6 laps to go, Harvick made the most of it and took full advantage of a 6 car length lead as he crossed the granite stripe to win by .442 seconds, joining last weeks winner Martin Truex Jr on the chase board, his name in the second spot, with his son Keelan by his side.
"One of our main goals was not to stress ourselves out so bad", said Harvick, who eeked out a last ditch effort at Dover last year to leave the round of 16 drivers behind. "I feel like the performance of the car and the things that we're doing are good enough to be competitive, and we just need to not make mistakes and go from there"
Ricky Stenhouse Jr and Reed Sorenson collided on the backstretch to bring out the 6th caution of the race, and that set up the final restart where Harvick gained an advantage over the 20 of Matt Kenseth. Kenseth was unable to get to the rear bumper of the # 4 Jimmy Johns Chevrolet in the final 6 laps of the race. Harvick led a total of 8 laps.
NASCAR chastised Matt Kenseth for slowing down in the restart zone, thinking that he did the same on the previous restart when he held off Martin Truex Jr. He claimed that Truex was laying back a bit, and wanted him to get to his nose to make it a fair restart. Kenseth second-guess the way he handled the final restart with Harvick.
"I saw Kevin at my door, and I should have known better. I should have went deep in the box and waited, the restart is better down there."
Finishing third behind Harvick was Kyle Busch, who pitted for fresh tires on lap 265 and charged through the field. Brad Keselowski ran fourth and now leads the chase points grid by one point over Truex, with Kurt Busch, Carl Edwards, Truex, Jimmie Johnson, Kasey Khane and Kyle Larson rounding out the top 10.
Jamie McMurray, Austin Dillon, Tony Stewart and Chris Buscher all need to improve in the standings to avoid elimination after next weeks race at Dover International Speedway.