No. 29 Rheem Chevrolet
AAA 500 at Texas Motor Speedway
Budweiser Racing Team Notes of Interest
• As the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series (NSCS) field enters the final three races of the season starting with Sunday’s AAA 500 at Texas Motor Speedway (TMS), Kevin Harvick is ranked third in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup. He sits just 21 points behind series leader Carl Edwards after scoring a fourth-place finish at Martinsville Speedway. The Bakersfield, Calif., native earned has two top-five and five top-10 finishes in the first seven races in the Chase.
• Harvick will be available to members of the media outside the No. 29 hauler in the NSCS garage at 11 a.m. on Friday.
• The No. 29 team will race chassis No. 381 from the Richard Childress Racing NSCS stable. This is a brand new racer that will see its first on-track activity this weekend at TMS.
• In 17 starts at TMS, Harvick has earned three top-five and eight top-10 finishes. His best-ever finish at the track is third, a result he scored in November 2006. Harvick’s average starting position at the 1.5-mile speedway is 21st and he holds a 12.9 average finish. While Harvick has only led five laps at TMS, he’s completed 99.8 percent (5,674 of 5,688) of the laps run in NSCS competition there since 2001.
• Last November, Harvick started 26th, led a lap and took home a sixth-place finish at the 1.5-mile speedway. In April, Harvick started 29th and finished 20th at TMS. The team attempted to gain track position on the first two pit stops, but each time Harvick was blocked in his pit box and lost ground. Later in the race, Harvick went two laps down on long green-flag runs as he struggled with the handling of his No. 29 ride.
• Harvick holds several impressive Loop Data statistics after the first 33 races of the season, including: third in fastest speed in traffic; third in percentage of laps run on the lead lap (90.79 percent – 8,840 of 9,737 laps); fourth in closers; fifth in laps in the top 15 (69.1 percent – 6,731 laps); seventh in average running position (13.337); eighth in driver rating (92.3); eighth in fastest drivers late in a run; eighth in fastest drivers on restarts; eighth in green-flag speed; ninth in quality passes (1,684); ninth in fastest drivers early in a run; and 10th in laps led (4 percent – 391 laps).
• Harvick will drive the No. 2 Hunt Brothers Pizza Chevy Silverado for Kevin Harvick Inc. in Friday night’s WinStar World Casino 350k NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race at Texas Motor Speedway. The No. 2 NCWTS team is in the running for the owner points title and holds a 72-point margin over the No. 18 team. SPEED will provide the live television broadcast of the race at 8 p.m. ET and radio coverage will be provided by MRN Radio and Sirius XM NASCAR Radio.
• For the online version of the Budweiser Racing media guide, please visit http://www.budracingmedia.com.
• Follow along each weekend with Harvick and the team on Twitter. Check out @KevinHarvick for behind-the-scenes information straight from the driver of the No. 29 Budweiser Chevrolet. Get live updates from the track each weekend from @Black29Car, the PR team for Harvick. Also, follow @RCRracing and @RCR29KHarvick for additional information about the Richard Childress Racing organization.
Kevin Harvick on racing at Texas Motor Speedway:
Heading into Texas Motor Speedway, you’re 21 points back from the No. 99 (Carl Edwards). What are your team’s goals for Texas? “The goal is just to keep chipping away at the lead. We got a little behind at Talladega, but we just gotta keep doing what we’re doing. We’ve got three to go and we’re closer now then we were last week.”
From a driver’s standpoint, can you feel the speed at Texas Motor Speedway? “Texas is a really fast race track and the banking is where you can really feel how fast you are going. It’s one of those few race tracks where you feel the speed in the car. The unique part about Texas is that you have that big speed for about three or four laps and as you go through the tire run the speed really drops off a tremendous amount. But, from a driver standpoint, you have got a lot of options here and the race track has a lot of bumps that are great for character and you have to make your car work good and you have to get up off Turn 2, but you can run all over the race track. Obviously qualifying will be on the bottom, but when race time comes you will be moving around all over the place so it’s fun from a driver’s standpoint.”
You haven’t won at Texas Motor Speedway yet, but you’ve been pretty solid there. “Last year everything was rock solid. Obviously, you want that consistency and the things to go with that. Texas is a really fast race track. The grip goes away fast on the cars. You have some bumps to contend with, so you have to keep the splitter off the ground, but as low as you can to make as much grip as you can. It’s a tough place to do that.”
How has Texas Motor Speedway changed over the years? Every track changes over time. “You know, it really hasn’t changed over the last couple of years, but there for awhile, every year we would come back it would change a lot. Goodyear has done a good job with the tires to make them still wear out, but they’re really, really fast at the beginning of the run and they last fairly long through the runs. As far as the race track goes, it still has big bumps in the middle of Turns 1 and 2 and it still has the little bumps on the bottom of Turns 3 and 4. There’s still a big bump in that corner over the tunnel, so it has character. It wears the tires out of the car and they become harder to drive as the run goes on. It’s a fun race track to race on because you have options to move around, but you still have really, really big speed at the beginning of the runs.”