Kevin Harvick’s pursuit of a 10th ISM Raceway win ended up with a ninth-place finish in the TicketGuardian 500.
The Stewart-Haas Racing driver was trying to be the sixth driver in Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series history to win in double digits at one track. But he wasn’t able to move through the field to challenge for the lead and was forced to settle for a still solid top-10 performance.
“It took us I don’t even know how long to get past cars that were six, seven, eight-tenths slower than us at the end of the race, so just extremely difficult to pass,” Harvick explained about his day. “We got shuffled there on the restarts and just decided to come down and get tires and see if we could do something better than being in the middle on two tires, and it took us a long time to get back going.”
Because of the new rules package that produced higher speeds with the added downforce, Harvick said that played a significant factor in trying to move through the pack.
“The worst race that we see at Phoenix is the IndyCar race and they’re the fastest cars and they don’t pass each other one bit,” Harvick said. “I don’t know that faster is the answer to more passing, but obviously we can make our car better, but I think Kyle (Busch) made it through. It sounds like (Ryan) Blaney was leading and saving gas. I don’t know if that’s right or wrong, but he was able to manage traffic.”
Harvick believes getting points on the board any way possible including at the end of stages will be even more important this year given how he sees the new rules hindering the ability to pass.
“With how important track position is it’s gonna be extremely important,” he said. “We’ve seen the cars extremely difficult to handle in traffic through the first three races, so better score all the points you can because it’s gonna come down to track position.”
