Budweiser Racing Team Notes of Interest
Kevin Harvick and the No. 4 Budweiser Chevrolet SS travel to Long Pond, Pennsylvania, this weekend for the Pocono 400 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series (NSCS) race at Pocono Raceway.
Meet Harvick… Race fans in the Easton, Pennsylvania, area can meet Harvick at 4 p.m. on Thursday, June 5, at the Wegmans store located at 3791 Easton Nazareth Highway. A limited number of wristbands will be available for an autograph session with Harvick and they will be distributed by the store at 9 a.m. on the day of the event, limit two per person.
Chassis Info… The No. 4 team will utilize Chassis No. 843 in Sunday’s race. Harvick last raced this car at Darlington Raceway in April where he led a race-high 238 laps en route to his first victory at “The Lady in Black.”
Pocono Stats... Harvick has 26 prior NSCS starts at Pocono Raceway. He has five top fives and nine top-10 finishes, and has an average start of 19.0 and an average finish of 14.0 at Pocono.
A Look Back… During the June race at Pocono last year, Harvick started fifth and finished ninth.
Budweiser #SpeedTweets… Budweiser is tapping into race fans increasing affinity for social media by using Twitter to engage in a new and unprecedented way. The brewer’s latest effort, #SpeedTweets, is a Twitter-based weekly competition that will award 19 fans a trip to Charlotte, N.C., to race go-karts with Harvick. The contest runs the first 19 weeks of the 2014 NSCS schedule, with Budweiser’s official racing Twitter account, @BudweiserRacing, posting challenges throughout each race weekend. Participants (21 and older only) are required to register at Budweiser.com/SpeedTweets must follow @BudweiserRacing, and must reply to @BudweiserRacing with the hashtag #SpeedTweets in order for their answers to be considered. For information on contest rules and regulations, please visit http://speedtweets.com/legal.html.
Loop Data... Harvick owns several impressive marks in NASCAR’s Loop Data scoring system at Pocono heading into this weekend's event, including: third in closers (47 positions improved in the last 10 percent of laps in each race); sixth in quality passes (712 passes); eighth in average running position (14.138); ninth in speed in traffic (159.924 mph); ninth in driver rating (89.6); and 10th in laps in the top 15 (2,042 laps).
Harvick on Racing at Pocono Raceway
Pocono Raceway is one of only seven tracks that the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series has visited that you’re winless at. What will it take for you to score your first cup win at Pocono this weekend?
“I think seeing the success that the team has had there in the past and seeing the success that Hendrick Motorsports has had, I think Pocono has probably been one of the places on the schedule that I’m looking forward to going to the most this year. I haven’t had a lot of success there, but between the two teams that we have access to information from, I think Pocono should be a lot of fun when we go back this time.”
Take us on a lap around Pocono. It’s got an extremely unique layout compared to most of the race tracks that the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series visits.
“I think as you look at Pocono, it’s got three very different corners and I think after the repave those corners are varied even more than in the past just because you carry a lot more speed into Turn 1 than you do the other corners. Pocono has very fast corners with a few different approaches because of the banking differences, but I think the biggest challenge is probably Turn 3 and getting your car to rotate through the center of the corner and still be able to stay in the throttle as long as you need to up off the corner.”