Harvick hopes to build on road-course success
WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. - Kevin Harvick is still in awe of his heart-stopping victory over Mark Martin in the Daytona 500 and the requisite fame that has come with it.
“I’ve been fortunate to win the Brickyard 400, but there’s nothing that matches the Daytona 500,” Kevin Harvick said. “It has an effect worldwide. There’s a lot more to it than a lot of people realize. It’s something I’ve kind of had to learn.”
Though other wins pale in comparison to that signature victory, Kevin Harvick counts his triumph in last August’s Nextel Cup race at Watkins Glen International as a breakthrough in his tenure driving for Richard Childress Racing.
“Personally, it was a major accomplishment in my career,” Kevin Harvick said. “We’d been able to win on all the different types of racetracks as we’ve gone through the years, but the road course thing, we always had this little cloud over us. We had been in contention to win and always had things happen. To finally do that was pretty satisfying.”
Beating Tony Stewart made it even more enjoyable.
Stewart has five road course victories since coming to NASCAR in 1999 from open-wheel racing and had won three of the previous five races at The Glen. Kevin Harvick passed him for the lead with three laps to go with a gutsy inside maneuver coming out of the 11th and final turn on the 2.45-mile natural terrain road course.
“Any time you succeed at something, you don’t want to have it handed to you,” Kevin Harvick said. “It makes it a lot more rewarding to do it against somebody that had been winning all of the races there and been very successful on road courses. To go out and be able to race with Tony was a lot of fun. In the end, it made it that much more rewarding.”
Kevin Harvick followed up that road course success in June by finishing second to Juan Pablo Montoya at Sonoma in the first two road races on the 2007 Cup schedule. The second is Sunday’s 220-mile Centurion Boats at The Glen event.
Preparing for the race will be a guessing game at first for the teams attempting to qualify. NASCAR has not allowed any practice at The Glen in the Car of Tomorrow, forcing teams to test elsewhere to try to simulate what they might encounter on The Glen’s high-speed turns.
“It’s obviously going to change things,” said Kevin Harvick, who practiced in July at Virginia International Raceway in preparation for The Glen. “You’re going to have to go through some different gearing, more so than normal. As you get through practice, everybody kind of knows the tendencies of the cars now, and we’ve all tested a lot.”
In the previous two races at Watkins Glen International, cautions dashed the chances of victory for four-time Watkins Glen winner Jeff Gordon and Kurt Busch.
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