For the second straight week, Kevin Harvick looked dominant in the early stages of a Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race.
Harvick was the class of the field in the first stage of the Pennzoil 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, leading Laps 1-43 from the pole and closing out the stage after green-flag pit stops by leading Laps 62-80.
In the second half of the race, however, Harvick lost the handle on his No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford and fell to fourth at the finish. The arc of the Las Vegas event mirrored that of the Atlanta Cup race a week earlier, when Harvick won the second stage before fading to fourth.
“The second half of the race, it’s happened to us two weeks in a row,” Harvick said. “The last two weeks, we’ve just been way off to start practice, based on where everybody thought we should start. And we just weren’t even in the ballpark, making huge changes to get in the ballpark.
“They’ve done a great job of getting the car close. When we get some baseline stuff here, we can strt working on the details and not scrambling so much. But they’re doing a great job, and we knew that was going to be a possibility, and we didn’t know where we’d be with our cars.
“We qualified decent and had a good first half of the race two weeks in a row, but just got tighter as the race went on.”
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.
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