Yahoo Autos Kevin Harvick Wins First of Two NASCAR Rounds at Michigan
By the end of August, NASCAR will have caught up to its pre-pandemic schedule. The series will host its last ten races, the Playoff-branded postseason events, as scheduled, but before it can get to that point, it needs to complete an odd Summer running in double time, packed with strange races run with strange rules at strange times.
Today's race, a late Saturday afternoon front end of a double header called the Firekeeper 400 despite being neither 400 miles nor 400 kilometers long, was perhaps the strangest race yet. A flurry of late race cautions and an Overtime restart are normally the sort of things that push a NASCAR race well past the three hour range, but this race saw all of these and a red flag and still clocked in at just over two-and-a-half hours. All this, coupled with a traction compound in the outside lane and the regular season debut of the new "Choose cone" restart lane selection rule previously showcased at the All-Star race, made this perhaps the most memorable forgettable Summer race on an intermediate in years.
Make no mistake, however, this was still Kevin Harvick's race to lose. Harvick led 90 of what turned out to be 161 laps and rarely faced serious pressure in the early running. However, a heavily favored outside lane led most of the field to prefer losing a spot to retain a starting position on the outside on most restarts, allowing Chase Elliot to vault from fifth all the way to second on one restart. Elliott grabbed the lead on the restart, and Harvick eventually fell to third ten laps later when the same process repeated with Kyle Busch, who took the lead from Elliott.
The focus on the outside lane for teams selecting their restart lane came in no small part due to a combination of track conditions and competition package that, like so many races these past two years, had made passing the leader on-track nearly impossible. So, one would assume that Harvick's dominant race would end like so many dominant NASCAR races have in this era of double file restarts, relegated to a footnote of someone else's win stolen late. Harvick had no interest in this, and no interest in allowing Busch to win his first race of the season, so he applied significant pressure to Busch's rear bumper, eventually creating enough of an aerodynamic disturbance to cause Busch to briefly lose control. Harvick retook the lead, and retained it after two more yellows forced two more restarts.
The mad dash of late restarts gave teams ample opportunity to try new strategies with the lane selection rule, leading to a top ten that shuffled wildly over the closing laps. In the end, Brad Keselowski would wind up second, ahead of Martin Truex Jr. and Ryan Blaney, while late race leaders Kyle Busch and Chase Elliott could do no better than fifth and seventh, respectively.
Notably, the many late shuffles on restarts hurt Erik Jones, the young Joe Gibbs Racing driver who recently announced that he will lose his ride with the top team at the end of this season. Jones sits 16 points out of NASCAR's postseason, and needs every point he can grab to retain any chance of finishing in the top 16 of the season standings. He, rookie Tyler Reddick, and seven-time series champion Jimmie Johnson remain on the outside looking in, about a third of a race worth of points behind final Playoff driver William Byron.
Matt DiBenedetto and Clint Bowyer are each about 25 points ahead of that race, meaning they would have a comfortable cushion on the field so long as they don't fail to finish two of the next five races. Any full-time driver in the top 30 in the season standings is automatically added to the field, however, meaning that their race could suddenly jump from a battle for 14th to a battle for the 16th and final spot in the Playoff field. All of these drivers are probably more concerned with upcoming road course and superspeedway rounds at the Daytona infield road course and standard layout, respectively, than they are with the relatively standard races remaining at Dover and Michigan.
The second leg of the Michigan doubleheader will be run at 4:30 PM EST tomorrow.
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