Budweiser Racing Team Notes of Interest
• Anheuser-Busch and its family of wholesalers annually celebrate the repeal of Prohibition on April 7 – the day the Cullen-Harrison Act took effect in 1933, legalizing the sale of 3.2 percent alcohol by volume beer in the District of Columbia and the 20 states in which state laws did not prohibit its sale. Kevin Harvick and the No. 29 Budweiser is Back Chevrolet team will join in the celebration of this milestone in American brewing history by running a special paint scheme for this weekend’s Goody’s Fast Relief 500 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series (NSCS) race at Martinsville Speedway.
• Budweiser is Back…The “Budweiser is Back” black and white paint scheme pays homage to the post-Prohibition days of the early 20th century with the newspaper headline from 1933 announcing “Prohibition Ends at Last!” on the hood. The TV panel features the words of August A. Busch Jr. who proclaimed “Happy days are here again,” during a special radio broadcast on KMOX CBS Radio as the first trucks carrying Budweiser left the St. Louis brewhouse.
• Prohibition Ends at Last… Budweiser was one of America’s best-selling beers from 1898 until Prohibition effectively halted production in 1919, so naturally, the country looked to Anheuser-Busch to lead the celebration as the first cases of Budweiser rolled out of the company’s St. Louis brewery just after midnight on April 7, 1933. On the night of April 6, 1933, more than 25,000 St. Louisans, representing the hopes and dreams of American workers, long since home from the war and demoralized by the Great Depression, gathered with eager hearts and tin cups in hand to once again enjoy a cold glass of Budweiser, a sensation unknown to them for 14 years. As the clock atop the brewhouse showed one minute past midnight on April 7, 1933, sirens and steam whistles sounded, the large wooden doors of the brewery’s Bevo bottling plant opened to the cheers of the thirsty, and 55 trucks laden with America’s favorite brew rolled out into the night, delivering the first cases of post-Prohibition Budweiser to the masses. Though the national repeal of Prohibition for all forms of alcohol did not become finalized until December 5, April 7 marks the most significant anniversary in the American beer industry.
• Looking Back… Harvick and the No. 29 Budweiser is Back Chevrolet team return to Martinsville Speedway this weekend as defending champions of the Goody’s Fast Relief 500. In last year’s race, Harvick passed Dale Earnhardt Jr. with only four laps remaining in the 500-lap event to pick up his 16th career win in NSCS competition. The effort marked back-to-back trips to Victory Lane for Harvick and the No. 29 team as they also scored the win the previous weekend at Auto Club Speedway. The victory at Martinsville was the second of four wins the team earned in 2011.
• Media Availability… Harvick will be available to members of the media at 10:30 a.m. ET on Friday in the Martinsville Speedway infield media center.
• Celebrating Start No. 400…Harvick will mark a milestone in his NSCS career this weekend as he makes his 400th career NSCS start in Sunday’s race at Martinsville Speedway. Since his first NSCS start on Feb. 25, 2001, at North Carolina Speedway (Rockingham Speedway), Harvick has earned 18 wins, 88 top-fives, 177 top-10s and five pole awards.
• Statistically Speaking… Harvick has made 21 NSCS starts at Martinsville Speedway since 2001. During that time he has scored one win (April 2011), three top-fives and 10 top-10 finishes. He has completed 97.44 percent of the laps run in those 21 races (10,250 of 10,519) and he’s led a total of 342 laps at the short track. Harvick holds an average starting position of 13.9 and an average finish of 15.9 at Martinsville.
• Loop Data… Since the inception of NASCAR’s Loop Data Statistics in 2006, Harvick has competed in 14 NSCS races at Martinsville Speedway and owns impressive marks at the short track heading into this weekend’s Goody’s Fast Relief 500, including: sixth in Closers; seventh in Average Running Position (14.120); seventh in Driver Rating (94.4); seventh in Fastest Drivers Early in a Run; seventh in Green-Flag Speed; seventh in Laps in the Top-15 (4,584/65.3 percent); eighth in Fastest Laps Run (182); eighth in Laps Led (195); ninth in Speed in Traffic; 10th in Fastest Drivers Late in a Run; and 10th in Fastest on Restarts.
• Local Talent on the No. 29 Team… Martinsville, Va., is home base for No. 29 Budweiser is Back Chevrolet team co-hauler driver Mark Williams. Williams and the team’s primary hauler driver Dennis Gammons logged nearly 40 hours combined at the wheel of the No. 29 hauler as they covered approximately 2,408 miles on the return trip to the Richard Childress Racing shop in Welcome, N.C., following last Sunday’s Auto Club 400 at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, Calif. This week Williams’ trip to the track will be much shorter as the drive from the RCR shop to the speedway will clock in at a little more than 125 miles round trip.
• In the Rearview Mirror… Last weekend at Auto Club Speedway, Harvick and the No. 29 team scored a fourth-place finish in the rain-shortened Auto Club 400. He is currently ranked second in the NSCS driver point standings on the strength of two top-fives and three top-10 finishes in the first five races of the season. During that span, he’s earned an average starting position of 9.0 and a 7.0 average finish.
• Double Duty for Harvick… In addition to driving the No. 29 Budweiser is Back Chevrolet in Sunday’s race, Harvick will pilot the No. 2 NASCAR Camping World Truck Series entry for Richard Childress Racing in Saturday’s Kroger 250. SPEED will provide live race coverage starting with the pre-race show at 1 p.m. ET. MRN Radio affiliates and Sirius XM NASCAR Radio will carry the live radio broadcast.
• For the online version of the Budweiser Racing media guide, please visit http://www.budracingmedia.com.
• 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. Fans can also interact with Harvick on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/OfficialKevinHarvick.
Kevin Harvick discusses Martinsville Speedway:
Talk about coming to Martinsville Speedway this spring as the defending race winner. “It feels good. Obviously we’ve been fast at Martinsville a lot and to be able to put together a complete day like we did last time at the end of the race we were able to capitalize on a fast car and win the race. We had a lot of things to overcome on that particular day and were able to pull out a win.”
You’ve won in Truck, Nationwide and Sprint Cup Series competition at Martinsville Speedway. What is it about Martinsville that suits your driving style? “I just like the short tracks. I grew up, as a lot of us did, racing short tracks and Martinsville has always been a place I’ve enjoyed racing at.”
Martinsville Speedway is a track that’s kept a foothold in our sport while NASCAR has expanded out across the country. Talk about why a track like Martinsville is important to our sport. “I think you can look back at the history of Martinsville and watch a lot of races and see a lot of things that have happened there. To be able to still race on that particular track today in virtually the same setting is cool for the sport and cool for the competitors to be able to do that year after year.”
Looking to Martinsville, you have three straight top-four finishes at the track, including winning your first grandfather clock there last spring. Are you excited to get the monkey off your back of having good runs derailed by wrecks or mechanic failure and having solid runs and being able to finish? “For us it was good to get the win out of our way and getting those solid finishes over the last couple of years has been good for us. We felt like we have always run fairly well there, we just never could put together a complete day. Really, the spring race last year, when we won, we had a tough go at it in the first half of the race, and actually wrecked and got a car tore up and were able to fix it and keep ourselves on the lead lap and make our car a lot better as we went through into the second half of the race. You know, it all worked out in the end. So it’s a race track we feel confident at. All of our cars have run well there in the past. It’s really keeping yourself out of trouble and getting to the end and hopefully by the end of the day you’re in position to do something in the top-five.”
How substantial is it to have your cars run extremely well in terms of sharing data and making sure you have the right brake package and right setups to make sure you can perform well on long runs when we get those 90-lap runs at Martinsville that happen late race? “There are directions for the company that obviously work better for us than others. It tends to change every time you go there to be honest with you, just for the fact the tire might change a little. I haven’t heard anything that it’s supposed to change this time. But I think as you go to these racetracks and you see the different trends, all of us kind of drive a little bit different, so you wind up with differences in your car but most of the time they are down a very similar path. It’s just fine tuning those cars and being able to get it the driver’s liking, but any time you can go to a race track…Martinsville is a great example, of company-wide, we seem to run very well at (that race track) and that always makes things a lot easier for the simulation engineers and the planning from each team’s perspective.”