Kevin Harvick and his scraped up car was no match for Martin Truex Jr. over the course of the final 20 laps at Darlington.
Truex got past Ryan Newman and Brad Keselowski on the race’s next-to-last restart and sprinted away to the lead. A caution with 18 laps to go bunched the field up one last time, but Harvick couldn’t do anything with Truex over the course of the final 12 laps of the Southern 500.
There’s no debating that Harvick had the best car over the entire race. He led 214 of the race’s 367 laps. But there’s also no exaggerating that Harvick lost nearly 20 spots on pit road over the course of the race.
The team’s slow pit stops, especially in the last 250 miles, put Harvick at a track position disadvantage. After one slow pit stop, Harvick’s team exchanged air guns with Danica Patrick’s team in an attempt to ensure no further problems would occur.
“Same old thing. You get in a position where you bring a dominant car – the guys in the shop and the guys in the garage are doing a great job and the guys on pit road are doing a terrible job,” Harvick said. “You get into a position to win races and they continually step on their toes and don’t make it happen and you’re not going to win races like that.”
Harvick also hit the wall while attempting to chase down Truex before the race’s final caution flag. While the damage wasn’t debilitating, it certainly didn’t help his efforts to run down Truex.
“Tonight we weren’t the best car for once and we actually won,” Truex said.
Yes, even he knew Harvick had the race’s best car. And he also knows how it feels to have a strong car and come up short in 2016. While Truex set records in his dominating win at Charlotte in the Coca-Cola 600 in May, he’s led over 100 laps in three other races without notching another victory until Sunday night.
That stat doesn’t even count races like last week at Michigan where a jack issue on a pit stop led to a damaged car that couldn’t run near the front afterwards.
“We’ve been one of the fastest, if not the fastest, all summer long,” Truex said. “Everywhere we’ve been. And we’ve had a lot of rotten luck. It was worth having all that luck if that’s what it takes to get a Southern 500 trophy.”
The win is Truex’s first at Darlington and his fifth overall in the Cup Series. His team, Furniture Row Racing, notched its first win in the Cup Series in 2011 at Darlington when Regan Smith won.
Truex’s win also means Toyota has won the season’s biggest races so far in 2016. Denny Hamlin won the Daytona 500 (by inches over Truex), Truex won the 600 while Kyle Busch won at Indianapolis. And that success in big races is a monstrous reason why Toyota’s Joe Gibbs Racing an FRR are considered the team(s) to beat for the Sprint Cup title.
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