It was the second race of this young season with a finish that close.
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The race ran without caution for the final 99 laps, and on lap 172, Jones caught Busch in traffic and pulled alongside.
Hamlin managed to take third place but was left ruing the near-miss.
“I don’t think there’s any real love lost between the two of us”, Harvick said after Sunday’s 0.01-second Sprint Cup victory over Edwards. I got down there and I was going to go to the top and he moved up so I went to the bottom and I thought ‘I’m going to move him out of the way.’ I didn’t want to wreck him.
“When I saw the blue (wall), the angle I was at and the speed I was at, I knew it was going to be a big impact”, Johnson said.
The Harvick-Edwards animosity dates back several years. (Lap 163), Brad Keselowski (Lap 226) and Kahne on Lap 307.
“I was surprised we finished as good as we did”, Earnhardt said. “I think he’s a bad person”. “So to start the year with a win, it’s like, ‘Oh, I got that one out of the way'”.
Would Harvick have been more aggressive had he been the overtaking driver instead of Edwards?
The Bakersfield, California, native went from minor league races at Phoenix to dominating this track after it was repaved in 2011. “We had the rain situation last time, and we were all fairly distraught over the situation and not winning the race”. “But sometimes our brains don’t work exactly like they should inside the race auto and you don’t really realize where you are or what you’re doing”.
“I know that you leave here and you don’t win, you’re disappointed”, said Harvick of the expectations he has coming into the desert mile.
“It’s definitely the way that things should have been done”.
In the end it was clear that the two-tyre gambit had been the right one, with Earnhardt dropping to fifth place and Dillon falling to ninth by the finish. “But it just wasn’t going to work without bumping him”. For me, I don’t really pay attention to any of that.
What we’re seeing reminds me of how it was in the old days where if you can make your auto drive better, you not only can catch the vehicle ahead of you, but also drive by them. “But that’s just racing”. Daniel Suarez was third, giving Joe Gibbs Racing a top-three sweep for the second consecutive week.
The free NASCAR live video stream on FOX is a great way to follow the race on the go by streaming video to a smart phone or tablet from just about anywhere. However, the late-race caution meant that the rest of the field would be on his tail for the final restart, and many of those other drivers opted to come in for fresh tires during the caution. We’ve really come a long way on this race track.
“They were able to get in the corner a little deeper, roll the center a little faster and get back on the gas a little earlier”, Allgaier said.
Jones said the setups are similar but also tailored slightly for each driver.
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But there was Harvick on Saturday morning with the second-fastest vehicle in practice on the mile oval behind Kurt Busch.
