“To pull it into victory lane here at Talladega is so cool”. He clipped Trevor Bayne, causing a wreck that brought out the caution. Controversy erupted, firstly as to who on Earth was in front at the time of caution coming out – NASCAR eventually ruling Logano was the leader, just, therefore seeing Earnhardt Jr dumped out of the Chase – and secondly whether Harvick had caused the incident safe in the knowledge that doing so would preserve his spot in the next Chase round. I saw the lights come on when I was still in the lead and I thought we had it. It is all about how the timing loops are and the camera to make sure that is what happened. “The restart before that he had engine problems and got out of the way”.
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He appeared in great shape when the caution came out with five laps to go after Jamie McMurray lost his power steering. So I go by and get hooked in the left-rear.
Bayne was one of the drivers that contended Harvick crashed him on objective. The guys gave me a good vehicle.
“The 4 could only run about 30 miles an hour”, Hamlin said after the race. The race continued in surprisingly well-behaved fashion, with Denny Hamlin becoming the first Chase driver to hit real trouble in freakish fashion – the emergency escape hatch in the roof of his vehicle came loose and earned a mechanical black flag, costing him 3 laps in pitstops to try and tape the hatch down. He finished with a six-point cushion on Ryan Newman, who at ninth in the standings was the first driver to miss the cutoff to advance to the next round.
And if you dismiss Bayne’s complaint that Harvick did it on objective, you must also immediately dismiss Matt Kenseth’s complaint against Joey Logano from Kansas.
On his in-car radio prior to the final restart, Harvick expressed frustration that the race was being restarted after the initial aborted restart. In fact, a few said, Harvick advanced precisely because of the sick engine and the closing sequence of events.
“We believe so far that we did everything procedurally correct and the 4 auto did nothing wrong”, Helton said. Harvick’s vehicle had started having issues and he said it would not accelerate. But we went to Martinsville and sort of surprised ourselves with our win there. “We don’t see anything there that is suspect so far”. We haven’t seen anything.
After botching the new single green-white-checker attempt, Kevin Harvick vehicle didn’t get up to speed, causing a pileup and subsequent caution.
“I’m more proud of the drive I had today than the two wins this year”, Earnhardt said. “It sucks, but it worked out”. Earnhardt wasn’t among the drivers who seemed miffed at Harvick, who preserved his spot in the third round of the playoffs.
“What are you going to do?”
“We weren’t running very well there at the end on restarts and we were just trying to get out of the way”, Harvick said.
Harvick believed he might have had a busted exhaust pipe that was hurting his ability to get going on the restarts.
“You have to ask somebody in race control”, Logano crew chief Todd Gordon said. “We’re not the ones that invented this [system]”. Earnhardt was unable to race Logano for the win once the caution was called.
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“I feel like no matter the rules, when the race is over, I can live with the result as long as everyone else is going by the same rules”, Earnhardt said.
