DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Kevin Harvick, who has won numerous restrictor-plate races including the 2007 Daytona 500, won't practice drafting at Preseason Thunder.

On Friday, Harvick made a strong case for why he thought none of the 36 teams at the pre-Speedweeks test session on the newly-paved Daytona tri-oval had drafted in big packs Thursday -- and might not at all.

"Practice is just not going to be at a premium like it used to be here."

--KEVIN HARVICK

"For us, we came with a checklist," Harvick said. "We don't care what the scoreboard says, we don't care if you hit on something -- you're going to run down the checklist, you're going to run through the things you want to run through -- and that's it.

"And that's what we're going to do. We're not going to draft. We felt like they learned what they needed to learn at the tire test down here with Paul [Menard] and Jeff [Burton]. You're going to get plenty of time to practice when you come down to Speedweeks."

But unlike the pattern established in previous years, in Harvick's -- and apparently many other teams' -- opinion, with the new pavement, very little practice will be needed.

"Practice is just not going to be at a premium like it used to be here," Harvick said. "Just because of the fact that you don't have to worry about the tires, you don't have to worry about the handling of the cars -- you literally just have to play the game and let it all play out, try to put yourself in position and to get as much speed out of your car as you can."

And since, Harvick explained, most of that speed is attained before the teams reach the race track, the bottom line becomes the fact risking the car isn't worth the limited reward of the amount of information to be gained.

"It's late [Friday] -- it's almost February," Harvick said. "It's unbelievable the amount of time and preparation that goes into these cars. A normal race car you can put a body on it in four days while these particular cars probably take twice that long, just in the fab [fabrication] shop.

"These cars will all run through the wind tunnel, once or twice at a minimum, and then you usually run them somewhere in the desert [such as automaker proving grounds in Yuma and Mesa, Ariz.]. So there are just hours and hours put into these race cars.

"They're not like a normal downforce car, so when you tear one up, you're looking at putting yourself behind a month, on one car, to properly do it. Sure, you can build a car and you can paint it and put it all in there, but the final details of the car take months and hours and hours so it's just not in the rotation at this point in the season to tear your car up."

The track was available for drafting Thursday afternoon, but no large groups participated.

The nose knows

One thing readily apparent -- at least visually -- on the Cup cars testing at Daytona is the brace-less front splitter that's now a molded part of the cars' nose, and how that nose pairs up with the cars' tails for bump-drafting, which a couple Toyota pairs did Thursday. The lack of any large drafting packs created an information gap.

"I haven't seen a big difference in it yet [but] again, we've only done a little bit of testing with it -- we haven't obviously raced it yet," Martin Truex Jr. said of his Toyota. "I think a lot of things will be different about the way the cars pull up and are able to push cars in traffic, things like that.

"In the testing we've done it's a little bit more solid when it hits the ground, I feel like, but very, very similar [to the previous splitter that was a separate piece with vertical braces], and I believe the stuff that we've seen from the wind tunnel is very close, aero wise, too."

"I just think it looks great," Carl Edwards said of his Ford. "It looks a lot more like the cars we drive on the street, and I think that's good."

Money talks

A.J. Allmendinger became Richard Petty Motorsports' front-runner near the end of last season, when the organization struggled financially as a four-car program. But at Preseason Thunder, RPM debuted its two-car operation for 2011, with Marcos Ambrose stepping into RPM's No. 9 car to join Allmendinger's No. 43 Ford.

"It isn't so much [working with] Marcos as it is going down to two cars," Allmendinger said of his optimism. "I think that will be really good for the team. This team has had a lot of good resources, but it was just spread too thin.

"Obviously, we went through a rough time at the end of last year that we fought through and hopefully we are better because of that. We are more funded now and more money helps. We have some new race cars to start the year, which we didn't have last year, and I am really excited about that."

Thursday, the RPM cars were from the middle to the bottom of the time sheet, but no one seems greatly concerned.

"I think that overall, last year, we had a good race team," Allmendinger said. "We weren't great, we weren't really good -- we were good. I felt like we were a top-15 team last year. We need to work on consistency throughout the race. Every race, for basically the last six months, I felt like we were a top-10 team at some point during the race but we would lose that at certain areas and couldn't get it back.

"We have to figure out why our car is on that edge that when it goes bad, it goes really bad. If we can get better with that, I think we will be OK because we have the speed."

And Allmendinger is personally feeling the pressure.

"For me, it is a critical year," Allmendinger said. "We have to win. We have to be more consistent and win some races and get that off our back. It felt like each year as a driver I have progressed. The first couple of years I was just trying to survive. In 2009 it was just trying to get through the year as a fourth, non-funded car.

"Last year I thought we worked together and gave ourselves opportunities to win, but didn't take advantage of it at times. We have to give ourselves more of those opportunities and we need to come through and win. We need a lot more top-10s and some top-fives. I think we have to have a 12th, 13th-place average in both qualifying and races. If you do that, you are going to have a good shot at being in the Chase."

Good to the last drop

Owner/driver Tony Stewart put the exclamation point on Daytona's repaving job when he described something he could do -- though by Friday morning he hadn't instructed crew chief Darian Grubb to put a cupholder in his car.

"It's almost an identical feeling to what we had at Talladega," Stewart said. "Obviously the transitions off of [Turns] 2 and 4 are a little more abrupt than what we have at Talladega, but as far as the ride, you literally could hold a cup of coffee with the lid off, full, and not spill a drop riding around."