You didn’t have to open a Superman comic to find Bizarro World—Sunday’s Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway had all the strangeness a fan of cosmic weirdness could hope to find.
Kevin Harvick, a driver who wasn’t a factor for 600 miles, won the race when Dale Earnhardt Jr. ran out of gas a half-mile from the finish line after the event went to overtime for the first time in its history.
And despite the victory, Harvick still can’t stand racing at Charlotte.
“Even though we won, I’m still miserable,” Harvick said after the race. “In about 30 minutes, I’ll be happy, when we drive out of that tunnel and leave the month of May behind.”
Earnhardt ran out of gas in sight of the checkered flag, breaking the hearts of fans who were certain until the last moment that Earnhardt was about to break a 104-race drought. NASCAR.com
“We weren’t supposed to make it,” said Earnhardt Jr., who managed to coast home in seventh. “We were going to run out of gas and kind of knew it, but we played our hand. That’s what we were going to do. Other guys came in, and I tried to save a ton of gas. I know I didn’t save enough, but I tried to save as much as I could.”
Five-time defending series champion Jimmie Johnson blew an engine and dropped oil on the track in the closing laps, which setup a green-white-checkered finish. During the caution, Earnhardt Jr. turned his engine off in an attempt to save gas. He had trouble restarting his car, running third at the time.
Greg Biffle held the lead before the caution, but Biffle was forced to pit, which allowed Kasey Kahne to assume the top position.
Kahne led the way for the final restart but ran out of fuel in the first turn, slowing up traffic behind him. Jeff Burton spun around after being bumped. NASCAR did not display the caution, as Earnhardt Jr. took over the lead.
Harvick led only two laps in the 402-lap affair. It was his first win a Sprint Cup points-paying race at Charlotte, a track he considers as one of his least favorites. MiamiHerald.com
“If we weren’t sitting here with two races won already and the strategy that we played with, the next-to-the-last pit stop coming with only 30 laps left to our pit window, we would have pitted,” Harvick said of earning his third victory of the year. “I might be wrong, but we would have pitted. But the way the pit strategy has been at Dover, has been at Darlington and you’ve seen these races won, you’ve got to be aggressive because if you’re not, somebody else is. We’ve talked about that, and two or three times tonight we made pit calls that we wouldn’t normally make.
“[Crew chief Gil Martin] is very aggressive, but I think tonight we took it to another level as far as the aggressiveness of staying on the race track and putting two tires on and just doing things that aren’t normal for us, that were a little bit outside the box.”
Harvick certainly had not been a contender for much of the race. He started 28th, and then ran outside of the top 10 for most of the night.
“We were lucky,” he said. “I told them at the beginning of this thing that we haven’t fixed this thing in two weeks, there’s no way we’re going to fix it today. Nothing against this race track, I just don’t like racing here. It just doesn’t feel right.”
Harvick also moved up three spots to second in the standings. And that may be the biggest gain of all. FOX Sports
David Ragan finished second at Charlotte, while Joey Logano, Kurt Busch and A.J. Allmendinger completed the top-five. Ragan won last Saturday’s Sprint Showdown preliminary event and advanced into the starting field for the all- star race.
“We were just in the right place at the right time,” Ragan said. “We had a strong car all day and got the finish that we deserved. We just went about doing it the hard way.”
Marcos Ambrose took the sixth position. Regan Smith, David Reutimann and Denny Hamlin finished eighth through 10th, respectively.
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