Kevin Harvick Wins Carfax 400

Although the Chase to the Sprint Cup can and probably will be a completely new battle, points leader Kevin Harvick showed championship strength in winning the Carfax 400 Sunday at Michigan International Speedway.

Harvick battled past Denny Hamlin with 11 laps to go on the two-mile track and pulled away for his third victory of the year. In winning, Harvick also became the first driver to qualify for the Chase.

Harvick's margin over Hamlin at the end was 1.731 seconds. Carl Edwards finished third, followed by Greg Biffle and Matt Kenseth.

"I can't believe I won at Michigan!" Harvick shouted over his radio as he took the checkered flag. "Great freakin' job, guys."

It was Harvick's first victory at Michigan, and the first at the two-mile track for car owner Richard Childress since Dale Earnhardt won in 1990.

"You can't force winning, winning just happens, it comes in cycles," Harvick said in his winner's interview. "Those circumstances all of a sudden start going your way. You just go racing. If they come at Daytona, I'm happy. If they come at Talladega, whatever. If they come at Martinsville, fine too. It's okay. I'm glad to win here today. But wherever they are, I'm happy in this deal. We've been in contention to win a bunch of 'em this year."

Harvick led a total of 60 laps, six fewer than Biffle, who dominated the first half of the race. Tony Stewart, who finished sixth, was also strong, as was Hamlin.

It was a largely clean race, with only five yellow flags, and only two of those for incidents. What turned out to be the final restart came on lap 173, and the final 27 laps was pure racing on a track with a variety of grooves.

Stewart was leading on the restart, with Harvick outside of him, but within a few laps, Hamlin had battled past both of them to take the lead on lap 178 coming through turn four.

Then Harvick moved past Stewart and began to battle Hamlin for the lead.

They traded the top spot a couple of times until, with 11 laps to go, Harvick swept past Hamlin on the outside of the backstretch and managed to make the pass stick for good coming out of turn four.



How did he make it work?

"Well, it's just a lot of years of getting beat by people running up there to be honest with you," Harvick said. "I never really could figure it out. So probably end of last year, middle of last year, first or second race of last year, I went home and watched some tapes of Dale Jr., to be honest with you, some of his previous races here because he always seemed to have a good handle on running the top groove.

"It was just more of a rhythm thing and some things that I needed to change in my approach to run up there."

"It was a battle, for sure," Hamlin said. "We are definitely happy with that run. We are trying all we can to get 10 more bonus points, but Kevin had a really strong car. It showed all day. We just kind of snuck up there.

"I knew we had a good car, but we never had really good track position," Hamlin said. "We were just hanging around eighth or 10th all day. I knew the capabilities of the car once we got out Mike (Ford, crew chief) made a great call to stay out there and luckily it gave me a shot to win it anyway."

While Harvick was locking up his spot in the Chase, the driver at the other end of the top 12, Mark Martin, was losing his grip on 12th place. Martin had a variety of problems on his way to a 28th-place finish. He slipped to 13th in the points, 35 points behind Clint Bowyer, who moved into 12th.