Three of Championship 4 will start in top nine at Homestead-Miami
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HOMESTEAD, Mia. – No one stuffed it in the wall, no one cracked under pressure. And Kevin Harvick continued to needle fellow NASCAR Sprint Cup Series driver Joey Logano.
The first day of on-track activity for NASCAR’s final race, the Ford EcoBoost 200 (Sunday, 3 p.m. ET, ESPN) to determine the 2014 Sprint Cup championship concluded without a hitch for the Championship 4 contenders — Denny Hamlin, Harvick, Logano and Ryan Newman.
Fireworks failed to materialize, although Harvick did his best to stay front and center here at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Harvick was fastest among the four in qualifying, and his Stewart-Haas Racing No. 4 Chevrolet will start fifth in Sunday’s 43-car field. Hamlin (Joe Gibbs Racing No. 11 Toyota) qualified eighth; Logano (Team Penske No. 22 Ford) ninth and Newman (Richard Childress Racing No. 31 Chevrolet) 21st.
The pole went to Jeff Gordon, his third this season and the 200th for his Hendrick Motorsports organization.
With Logano and Hamlin conducting their portion of the post-qualifying press conference, Harvick walked into the room and made a beeline for the stage, ignoring a request to wait and join Newman on stage after the Logano/Hamlin session had been completed.
“Sit next to my buddy,” Harvick said as he took a seat next to Logano.
“What’s up, friend?” Logano asked. “Long time no see.”
It was a minor act in a major play and no one knows how much or how little effect Harvick’s antics will have come Sunday.
Two days earlier and a bit further north, Harvick was quick to reference the finish of an earlier Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Talladega in which he felt Logano held up the outside line on a late restart, slowing Harvick and others enough to allow teammate Brad Keselowski to score the win and advance one more round.
“He knows I wasn’t joking,” Harvick said at the time.
Gamesmanship aside, Harvick said he was pleased with his team’s first day on the track. And with access to data from three teammates, as well as the teams of Gordon and the Hendrick organization, there’s plenty of information at his team’s disposal.
“We know we can get better tomorrow,” he said of the two practice sessions slated for Saturday. “We have a good spot to start in race trim and seven other cars that are running good to see some of the trends on their stuff today.
“All in all, we have a lot to look at and a lot of resources to pull from, and everybody is pulling the rope in the same direction, and we’ll just keep plugging away.”
Logano, eighth here a year ago but a winner of five races this season, called it “an OK day.”
The speed wasn’t there during practice, he said, but “once again, the 22 bunch kept their heads together, and we were able to make some good changes and found quite a bit of speed out of our car.”
Hamlin, the defending race winner, likened the feel of his car to last year’s piece.
“I knew we were going to win the race,” he said. “I knew in practice we were going to win the race, and my car feels equally as good this time around.”
Newman’s the lone one of the four without a victory this year, a point he’s been asked about constantly.
The pragmatic driver hasn’t changed his outlook — he knows the task that awaits his team.
“We start 21st … and I don’t think that’s the end of our day,” he said, “but my comment after qualifying was we beat half of them today, and we’ve got 267 laps to beat the other half on Sunday.
“We’ve got good equipment, good cars, good people. Our pit stops have gotten better. It’s going to be a crazy race, I think. It’s going to be some really crazy restarts, but I don’t think your starting position defines who’s going to finish there.”
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