No. 29 Budweiser Chevrolet
Samsung Mobile 500 at Texas Motor Speedway
Budweiser Racing Team Notes of Interest
• Fresh off back-to-back wins at Auto Club Speedway and Martinsville (Va.) Speedway, Kevin Harvick and the No. 29 Budweiser Chevrolet team will race under the lights at Texas Motor Speedway (TMS) on Saturday night in the Samsung Mobile 500.
• Crew Chief Gil Martin has selected chassis No. 309 for Saturday’s race. The No. 29 team utilized this car to score fourth-place finishes in both races at Pocono Raceway in 2010.
• In 16 starts at TMS, Harvick has scored three top-five finishes and eight top 10s. He started 19th in last year’s Samsung Mobile 500 and took home a seventh-place finish. Harvick’s average starting position at the 1.5-mile track is 20.5 and his average finish there is 12.4. His best-ever finish at the 1.5-mile track is third, and he earned that result in Nov. 2006.
• Harvick will be available to members of the media in the Texas Motor Speedway infield media center at 2:15 p.m. on Thursday, April 7.
• Last weekend, Harvick took home the famed Grandfather clock at Martinsville Speedway after moving into the lead with four laps to go and taking the checkered flag 0.727 seconds ahead of the second-place car. The victory was Harvick’s second in two weeks. The last time he scored back-to-back wins was in September 2006 (Richmond (Va.) International Raceway and New Hampshire Motor Speedway).
• Six races into the 2011 season, Harvick has scored two wins, three top fives and four top-10 finishes. His average starting position thus far is 16.3 and his average finishing position is 11.8. Harvick is currently ranked fifth in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series driver point standings and is just a mere 15 points out of the lead spot.
• This week in Budweiser Racing history: On April 2, 2000, Dale Earnhardt Jr. drove the No. 8 Budweiser Chevrolet to Victory Lane at Texas Motor Speedway after scoring his first career NASCAR Sprint Cup Series win. He started the race in fourth position, led 106 laps and took the checkered flag with a 5.920-second margin of victory.
• For the online version of the Budweiser Racing media guide, please visit http://www.budracingmedia.com.
• Become a fan of Budweiser on Facebook. Exclusive information, photos and video footage of Harvick and the No. 29 Budweiser Chevrolet team can be found on the Budweiser Facebook page at www.Facebook.com/Budweiser.
• Follow along each weekend with Harvick and the team on Twitter. Check out @KevinHarvick for behind-the-scenes information straight from the driver of the No. 29 Budweiser Chevrolet. Get live updates from the track each weekend from @Black29Car, the PR team for Harvick. Also, follow @RCRracing and @RCR29KHarvick for additional information about the Richard Childress Racing organization.
Kevin Harvick discusses racing at Texas Motor Speedway:
You haven’t won at Texas Motor Speedway yet, but you’ve been pretty solid there lately.
“Last year everything was rock solid. This year our goal is to put ourselves in position to win more races. Obviously, you want that consistency and the things to go with that. Right now we kill for the consistency over the first few races, but really I think that’s the biggest difference of what we have from last year to this year. You’re going to have a bad week, and you’re going to go on and forget about it and trying to make your car better. Texas is a really fast race track. The grip goes away fast on the cars. You have some bumps to contend with, so you have to keep the splitter off the ground but as low as you can to make as much grip as you can. It’s a tough place to do that.”
Because you guys have been so rock solid, do you feel like you guys can take it to the next level and get a top-five or even have a chance to win at Texas?
“Well you hope so. Obviously, we had a few things that we needed to work on when we left Vegas to have that raw speed that we thought we were lacking compared to a couple of the other cars. We’ve been working on some things. The off weekend gave us time to really try some things and hopefully those things pan out this weekend at Texas.”
How has the track in Texas been changing? Every track changes over time.
“You know, it really hasn’t changed over the last couple of years, but there for awhile, every year we would come back it would change a lot. Goodyear has done a good job with the tires to make them still wear out, but they’re really, really fast at the beginning of the run and they last fairly long through the runs. As far as the race track goes, it still has big bumps in the middle of Turns 1 and 2 and it still has the little bumps on the bottom of Turns 3 and 4. There’s still a big bump in that corner over the tunnel, so it has character. It wears the tires out of the car and they become harder to drive as the run goes on. It’s a fun race track to race on because you have options to move around, but you still have really, really big speed at the beginning of the runs.”