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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: RCR Drivers Strong In 500
Richard Childress Racing driver's Clint Bowyer and Kevin Harvick had strong showings in the Daytona 500...
Mike Hembree  |  Posted February 15, 2010   Daytona Beach, FL
Kevin Harvick led seven times in the race for 41 laps, while Clint Bowyer led eight times for 37 laps. Harvick led the most laps in the race, Bowyer the second most. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
The Daytona 500 was a race that either Kevin Harvick or Clint Bowyer easily could have won. Each had a strong car, and each was in the wild, throbbing mass of contenders in the race’s frantic closing laps.
Kevin Harvick led seven times in the race for 41 laps, while Clint Bowyer led eight times for 37 laps. Harvick led the most laps in the race, Bowyer the second most. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Bowyer wound up fourth, however, and Harvick came home seventh. It was not the finish either Richard Childress Racing driver anticipated, and the final laps are likely to be rerun in their memories for a while.

Harvick led seven times in the race for 41 laps, more than any other driver, and he led four of the final six laps. Bowyer led eight times for 37 laps, second on the list. He was in front for 13 straight laps near the end of the race.

Bowyer shared the front row with Greg Biffle as the field took the green for lap 199 and what could have been a two-lap dash to the finish. Biffle pushed ahead of Bowyer, but a crash and ensuing caution flag sent the race into overtime.

Bowyer was third and Harvick fourth on the first “green-white-checkered” restart, and Harvick quickly raced to the front in a complex web of traffic before the race again was slowed by a caution and the field was reset for a second green-white-checkered run.

On what turned out to be the final two laps of the race, Jamie McMurray and Biffle drafted past Harvick. McMurray held on to win the race, which went eight laps beyond its scheduled distance.

Harvick called the finish “wild” and was critical of driver Carl Edwards, who also was in the big drafting pack at the end and finished ninth.

“The No. 99 (Edwards) doesn’t really know where he’s going,” he said. “He went to the middle and kind of jammed it all up. But it was a great job by my Shell-Pennzoil guys. I just wish we knew we had somebody behind us who knew how to draft.

“It’s been a great day for us. We just thought we had the car to beat and just zigged when I should have zagged.”

Crew chief Gil Martin said Harvick “did an awesome job” to get to the front when he passed Martin Truex Jr. for the lead.

“I mean, what a power move to get past Truex,” he said. “I guess maybe we should have moved up (to the outside late in the race). There’s no way of knowing. We needed the top line to spin their tires on the takeoff right there. We kind of had the same trouble all SpeedWeeks long in how we could get through the corner so much better than everybody around us. It would leave us a sitting duck, and that kind of happened to him again.”

Harvick was leading the race at lap 162 when it was red-flagged for a second time because of track surface problems in the second turn. There was some talk that the difficult surface issue might end the race early.

“We knew when we were sitting out there leading that they were going to fix the racetrack,” Martin said. “There was no way that they weren’t going to. I still hate that it came down to the fact that we had to make some gambling decisions based upon the track, but that’s just the way that it played out, and that’s all we can do.”

At several junctures of the race, Bowyer appeared to have the day’s fastest car. And he got a drafting boost from Dale Earnhardt Jr. in the final laps.

“The No. 88 (Earnhardt Jr.) – wow, what a push he gave me on the outside,” Bowyer said. “I was just holding on. I probably made a mistake there. I needed my teammate behind me on the restart. I chose the outside. But my car was very strong, and we had a lot of fun.”

Bowyer finished fourth in the 500 for the second straight season.

Bowyer and Harvick will roll on to Auto Club Speedway this week trying to race away from what might have been at Daytona.

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEEDtv.com and has been covering motorsports for 28 years. He has written several books on NASCAR, including "NASCAR: The Definitive History of America's Sport" and "Then Tony Said To Junior: The Best NASCAR Stories Ever Told". He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.


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