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| Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch were 1-2 at New Hampshire in 2018. |
“When we go to Phoenix, we are always going for the win," Harvick said. "That’s been a great racetrack for me, personally, and since I’ve been at SHR, it’s become statistically one of our best racetracks as far as win counts go. It’s definitely a racetrack that we circle every year where we think we should have an opportunity to win.”
Harvick will be looking to expand upon his track record of nine Cup wins at Phoenix and join five other drivers in NASCAR history who have 10 wins at a single track. Richard Petty did it at five tracks, Darrell Waltrip did it at three tracks and David Pearson, Dale Earnhardt and Jimmie Johnson have done it at one place each. That's some serious company he's on the brink of joining.
He's won at Phoenix seven of his last 13 starts which is part of the reason the Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook posted him as a +225 favorite. The worst finish in his last 11 Phoenix starts was sixth place mixed in with 10 top-fives. The crazy thing about his domination in the desert is that he's been with two different organization and two different manufacturers along the way while also going through several different rules packages for the cars. The one constant has been Harvick being the driver to beat.
Now he's got another rules package to deal with this weekend, one different from what we saw the last two weeks when it debuted on the 1.5-mile tracks of Atlanta and Las Vegas. What are the differences?
“Phoenix is basically the same body, but you don’t have the drag ducts in the front," Harvick's crew chief Rodney Childers said. "You’ll have brake ducts going to your front routers and front calipers. Then, of course, you have the 750-horsepower engine at Phoenix instead of the 550 horsepower that we had at Vegas. A little bit more downforce – the cars are built for downforce and a little bit more power.”
The taller spoiler will also create more downforce and reports from a test at Phoenix last fall show that power is restricted from what they've been used to, but the response time on the throttle will be much quicker than what they used the past two weeks.
It should be interesting to watch unfold. There's still a bit of uncertainty that perhaps the new package closes that gap Harvick has created these past years. If looking at the Superbook odds to win, a place that has to be correct more than most because they're taking wagers on all the drivers and can lose cash if wrong, they're treating their odds almost the same as last season, which includes Kyle Busch the second-favorite at 7-to-2 odds. Busch won at Phoenix last fall leading a race-high 117 laps. He's also won there 10 times in the Xfinity Series.
"For some reason, I’ve always run well there," Busch said of Phoenix. "I don’t know if it’s that I’m comfortable being back close to home on the West Coast, or what. I always have a little more fan support out there, as well. As for the track itself, you’ve always had two distinctly different corners at Phoenix, which makes it fun and challenging all at the same time.”
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