It’s not fair to Martin Truex Jr.to say he was handed a Southern 500 victory win Sunday night on a sliver platter.
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Today’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Darlington Southern 500 race has a start time schedule of 6:00pm eastern time and airs on TV channel NBC.
Harvick’s chance at taking the checkered flag was pretty much wiped out when he lost a total of 17 positions in the pits, one more deviating than the next.
“Just to be mentioned with those two names is unbelievable enough”, said Truex.
Burton: It’s awesome. I don’t know who came up with this idea but whoever it was is a genius. “They won us the race”. We’ve been one of the fastest, if not the fastest auto all summer long and everywhere we’ve been we seemed to have rotten luck, but it was worth having all that bad luck if that’s what it takes to get a Southern 500 trophy. It is the final race of the regular season before the cutoff for the chase. Harvick pitted with the race lead but came out 12th because of an air-gun malfunction. (7) Denny Hamlin, Toyota, 367. 5.
It’s one of two races remaining before the Chase begins. That’s how things have unfolded for the driver who’s led the third-most laps, yet had just a single victory and three top-five finishes before Sunday.
Kevin Harvick led 214 laps on the night but ran into a series of pit road issues, the most serious of which was blamed on a failure of the team’s rear airgun used to tighten the wheel’s lug nuts.
When Clint Bowyer and Aric Almirola tangled shortly thereafter, destroying Almirola’s lovely No. 43 Richard Petty Motorsports throwback vehicle, Harvick caught a break. We just didn’t do a good job on pit road.
So on the ensuing restart with 12 to go, Harvick started on the outside of the front row, alongside leader Truex Jr., the only driver to beat him off pit road. In the previous three, Truex had finishes of second (Daytona 500), first (Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte) and eighth (Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis) for a four-race average finish of 3.0.
“Of course this is the first one that we have been too that Junior hasn’t been here”, mentioned Owens.
“We were just in a bad situation”. I feel we have a lot of resources and we’ve moved people around, like I said. “It’s nice too that Jeff came out of retirement that was very special and very nice of him to do that”, said Owens.
“Apparently he got mad at me”, said Scott. I have a lot of respect for Tony. “I’ve always loved this race track”. He was asked to the NASCAR hauler after spinning Brian Scott earlier in the race and when asked what happened, said simply, “He wrecked”. Stewart’s response to the incident?
To be honest they haven’t really led a ton of laps and they haven’t had a ton of speed so you were wondering, ‘OK.
The cream rises to the top at Darlington.
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“I’ve been wanting to win here for a long time, ” Sadler crowed after. “. I could go on and on for hours, I guess”. “It was frustrating to lead laps here and let a few slip away”. “I’m not sure if he thought I was trying to hold him up”.
