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Harvick hoping to continue momentum at Auto Club Speedway

By SceneDaily.com

Feb 19, 2009

Richard Childress Racing's Kevin Harvick may finally have figured out a way to get around Auto Club Speedway.

In his previous two starts at the 2-mile track in Fontana, Calif., Harvick finished eighth in the spring race and followed that up with his career-best finish at the track last fall by coming home fourth. Before last year's fourth-place finish there, Harvick's last top-five at Auto Club was sixth in the spring race in 2005.

Harvick is also hoping to continue his momentum from last Sunday's second-place finish in the rain-shortened Daytona 500.

"I know, statistically, it hasn’t been that good for us the first few years I went there, but we’ve had good performance and solid finishes, and it’s been a fun place to go," Harvick said of the California track. "It’d be fun to win here, just because it’s close to home and we’ve got a lot of family and friends there, so hopefully we can go back and do what we’ve done the past couple of years.”

Harvick, who finished fourth in the final Sprint Cup Series standings in 2008, is keeping his fingers crossed that Sunday's Auto Club 500 isn't postponed until the following day, as it was in 2008.

“Any time you start a race and stop it and start it and stop it and you have to go into Monday, it just kind of changes the type of race that it is," Harvick said.

Like other drivers, Harvick doesn’t look forward to competing on a "green" track, one that doesn't have rubber down on it. Over the course of a normal race weekend, if there is no rain, Cup cars and those from other series that compete at each track put down a significant amount of rubber on the track from tire wear, and more rubber makes for better racing.

"It adds a lot of twists and turns, just because you don’t have that steady progress of rubbering up the race track and having that consistent progress of knowing where your car is, setup-wise," Harvick said of rainy weekends. "You kind of lose track of that and have to guess a little bit.”

Harvick is also looking forward to racing at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on March 1 in order to see how he stacks up against the competition at 1.5-mile tracks. LVMS is the first 1.5-mile track on the schedule this season.

"[Auto Club Speedway] does give you a rough idea, but I think Vegas is the first race track you go to for your mile-and-a-half stuff where you really know where you’re at,” Harvick said.

Harvick also said he expects Roush Fenway Racing’s Carl Edwards to be extremely tough to beat at 1.5-mile tracks this season.

"[Edwards] was pretty consistent through the mile-and-a-half stuff, and if that continues, they’ll be the car to beat,” he said. “It’s so unpredictable, though. I’m sure there will be something that changes everything, and somebody else will be the guy to beat."