NEW HAMPSHIRE — LOUDON, N.H. — Kevin Harvick, a 21-year veteran driver, will be looking for his fifth victory at the 1.058-mile New England track as the NASCAR Cup Series visits The Magic Mile.
Harvick has had a lot of excellent racetracks over his career, and the Loudon is one of them. Harvick, who is 45 years old, has made 37 starts at NHMS and has won four times. He is tied with Jeff Burton for the most wins all time heading into Sunday’s Foxwoods Resort Casino 301.
Harvick leads the series with 13 top-five and 21 top-ten finishes, in addition to his four wins. No one has ever come close to beating ‘the closer’ at Loudon, although there are four active NASCAR Cup Series drivers with three victories – Kurt Busch, Kyle Busch, Ryan Newman and Denny Hamlin.
“New Hampshire has been really good to us, and I think Rodney [Childers] and I probably feel like we should have , could have – won them all,” said Harvick. “But it’s been a racetrack that has been really good for us from a performance standpoint.
From a confidence standpoint, being able to adjust on the car and know what we’re looking for, think this is definitely a racetrack where a lot of those things came into play. We used [a lot of] the same things that we’ve used in the past as far as tools of how we make our car go around the corner. It’s been a great racetrack for us.”
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While Phoenix Raceway remains his strongest track statistically, when comparing parallels between the two, New Hampshire isn’t far off. Harvick says they’ve both followed the same trend.
“When you look at SHR and the things we’ve been able to accomplish at Loudon and Phoenix, they’ve [kind of] followed that same trend,” said Harvick. “A lot of that goes back to that open test time we had at Milwaukee and Nashville.
Those are the places where we would practice and practice and practice. Our guys have done a great job of having a good short-track, flat-track program. Loudon is a place that has followed along with Phoenix and the success that we’ve had there. To be able to capitalize on that success and continue it at another track.”
Tomorrow, the closer, as he’s known, will try to win his first race of the season and his fifth at NH. Harvick is coming off an 11th-place finish at Atlanta Motor Speedway last weekend.
Oh, and there’s still another Lobster. His first one started to fall apart from the board it was mounted on. As a result, the Harvicks found a new use for the board.
“My lobster, they mounted on a board. It sat in a closet and his claws fell off and some of his arms and legs fell off. We took the lobster off the board, and we used the board for a skateboard ramp. That was what happened [to my] first lobster because he just fell apart and we used the board for Keelan’s skateboard ramp.”
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