“I don’t need to defend myself”.
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Earnhardt supported the decision before the race, and didn’t change his mind after Harvick hooked Trevor Bayne on the restart to trigger an 11-car crash that froze the field before Earnhardt had a chance to chase leader Joey Logano into the first turn. Somebody (wink, wink, Kevin Harvick) was using a suspicious metal object (cough, cough, “engine trouble”) to force a caution on the last lap in which the referee (um, NASCAR) saw nothing.
“I was fortunate to have the 10 (Patrick) there to help”, Harvick said Tuesday, his voice hoarse from a lingering cold. “I could be working on a boat, could be going out at 3 in the morning, banging ice off the thing when it’s freezing up”.
“One of the things that gets brought up a lot here that people are asking me about- ‘Are you ever going to come back? are you ever going to come back?” You have to continue to try to let it play out.
Not everyone thought Harvick was in the wrong. Before NASCAR crowns their 2015 champion this season in Miami, there are three races left to decide who will have the opportunity to run in the championship race. You can’t blame a guy for that. In the second round, when the pole is awarded, Kyle Busch was fastest at 99.674.
However, NASCAR president Mike Helton said: “There is no evidence right now that there was anything that the 4 auto did that was questionable”.
“We didn’t know going into qualifying we’d have that good of speed”, Truex said. If I would have done it, I probably would not have been racing (this week) at Martinsville. On the second first attempt, Kevin Harvick gave new meaning to the term “Harvicking” that was coined during last year’s Chase. Denny Hamlin won there earlier this year in the spring race at the paperclip-sized racetrack.
Carl Edwards: In his first 11 starts with JGR this season, Edwards managed only one top-10. At the beginning of the season I didn’t feel like… “If we do that for three more weeks, I think we make it to Homestead”. “But we’re still under the radar, and still I don’t think anybody expects that to happen, and we like it that way”. He’s going to stand behind what he believes in. “They’ve shown a few weakness – not to mention I don’t think it sits well with him when Joey is doing well”. This time, it’s impossible to prove that Harvick deliberately turned right into Bayne to save his season.
“I quit once in my life and I’ll never quit again”, Harvick said of skipping a regional wrestling match his final year of high school because it fell on the opening weekend of racing. In 45 career starts, Gordon has finished fifth or better an astonishing 28 times.
And although Truex hasn’t been able to put together that kind of streak since, he has managed stayed inside the Chase cut line through six races with an average postseason finish of 9.5.
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Keith Lindquist of Gray took top honors in ATV Intermediate, while a pair of Limestone riders, Nick Dunbar in the 450C race and Jakob Dotson in 450D, posted runner-up finishes.
