DOVER, Del. -- The final Cup Series practice before a weekend race has long been known as Happy Hour.

But there wasn't much that occurred during final practice Saturday at Dover International Speedway to change Kevin Harvick's already sour weekend mood. Despite leading the Cup point standings heading into Sunday's Autism Speaks 400 at the Monster Mile, Harvick wasn't living up to his own Happy Harvick nickname.

“

I really just don't like any of the race tracks we go to in the month of May, based on past history, to be honest with you. There isn't anything wrong with the race tracks -- but just for us statistically and performance-wise, it hasn't been our best month.

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-- KEVIN HARVICK

Remind us again when and how he earned that moniker?

His best lap time during Saturday's final Cup practice was only 25th-fastest (152.188 mph) of the 43 cars on the track. Of course Harvick wasn't the only one chasing the likes of Kyle Busch (154.209 mph), Denny Hamlin (153.919), Carl Edwards (153.794), A.J. Allmendinger (153.309) and Clint Bowyer (153.218), who made up the top five on the speed chart.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. also struggled. He was 23rd-fastest with a top lap of 152.400 mph. And Johnson, who had been the fastest in one of the two earlier weekend practices, was 16th at 152.918.

But of the top 12 drivers in the point standings, Harvick was the slowest. He tried to explain his dark mood on Friday.

"I really just don't like any of the race tracks we go to in the month of May, based on past history, to be honest with you," Harvick said. "There isn't anything wrong with the race tracks -- but just for us statistically and performance-wise, it hasn't been our best month."

He wasn't just taking verbal aim at Dover, either.

"I look at Charlotte [coming up] as our worst race track and I look at Darlington [where he finished sixth last Saturday night] as our second-worst track," Harvick said. "And this [meaning Dover] has not been a great track for us statistically, so there just is not a like in the month of May."

There was a silver lining of sorts in all the gray clouds, Harvick admitted.

"Last week was a like a victory at Darlington, and maybe we can have the same thing happen here and the same thing happen at Charlotte. That will really tell us what the performance of our cars are," Harvick said of his No. 29 Chevrolet and Richard Childress Racing as a whole.

Harvick's lead on four-time defending champion Jimmie Johnson in the point standings is 110 heading into Sunday. He has built it on the strength of one win, four top-five and eight top-10 finishes in the first 11 races.

So when folks start suggesting that this season seems to be boiling down to a two-man race between Johnson and the red-hot Hamlin, who has won three of the past six races to tie Johnson for the series lead in victories, that's the sort of thing that even gets the moody Harvick to chuckle.

"Well, you look at the way we started the year and we had a mechanical failure at Martinsville or [the lead] would be 200 points," Harvick said. "So the best way I can tell you to look at it is that it's 10 races [in the Chase at the end of the season].

"And if we can beat them in the first 10, we can beat them in the last 10. You can't have your car fall apart, win three races, and then have your car fall apart in the other races. So it's not about winning every week. You have to run 10 races at the end to put it all together."