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closeHarvick roars past Martin to win a Daytona 500 to remember
Winner comes from sixth place with one to go
DAVID POOLE / The Charlotte Observer
Sunday, Feb. 18, 2007
AYTONA BEACH, Fla. – This was the Daytona 500.
It was wild and it was controversial. It ended in a way that people will discuss and argue about for weeks, if not years. It was nearly enough to make one grown man cry.
“Man,” said Kevin Harvick, who won it with a stirring last-lap pass that came just as eight cars were piling into a huge wreck behind him, “this is the Daytona 500.”
“Man,” said Mark Martin, who was trying for the 23rd time in his career to win his sport’s biggest prize only to have it ripped from his fingers by two one-hundredths of a second, “this was the Daytona 500.”
Man, was it something.
For 150 laps, it seemed Tony Stewart and the brothers Busch, Kurt and Kyle, had the three cars from which the winner would emerge. But Kurt Busch and Stewart – or Stewart and Kurt Busch, depending on how you saw it – wrecked each other out of the race and things changed.
With the door thrown open to any number of potential winners, it was as if someone had dropped a tanker load of chum into a shark tank. It was every man for himself and, as established earlier, this was the Daytona 500.
Martin, who left Roush Racing after 19 years at the end of last season, found himself leading Greg Biffle and Matt Kenseth driving two of the team’s Fords with 20 laps to go Martin’s first start in Ginn Racing’s No. 01 Chevrolet.
Two multicar pileups later, Martin was still in front as the track was being cleaned up for a green-white-checkered finish. Behind him about eight spots was the rookie who replaced him in Roush’s No. 6 Fords, David Ragan.
“I would’ve paid money to have had the race over right then,” Ragan would say later.
Martin was sitting beside Ragan when he said that.
“You and me both,” he said.
Martin had much more work to do to.
Kyle Busch, whose No. 5 Chevrolet was one of the few constants on a cool, windy day, was in second with Biffle and David Gilliland, who’d started first and rallied from almost going a lap down, right there, too.
Harvick was seventh in a No. 29 Chevrolet for Richard Childress Racing that he’d bounced off the wall several times. With about 30 laps to go, he thought he was cooked because it was running so hot he had to fall out of the draft. But once he got a hole in the nose of his car patched, it got better the later it got and he had one more chance.
Martin held Busch off on the first lap of the two-lap overtime. He was still ahead coming off Turn 2 for the final time. Harvick was sixth at the white flag, but coming down the backstretch he suddenly was leading an outside line, getting a shove from Kenseth and a string of others.
Martin saw Harvick coming, but with Kyle Busch behind him he wasn’t worried. “I thought he was trapped on the inside line and he was going to be pushing me off Turn 4,” Martin said.
Even as Harvick pulled even and then slightly ahead in this drag race to glory, Martin felt like he was in good shape. He has run at Daytona so long, he knew that once Busch’s draft kicked in, the low line was the short way to the checkered flag.
What Martin didn’t know, though, was that Busch was gone.
Busch had skittered off the apron on the low side as he looked for racing room and veered left, sending Kenseth into the outside wall. That set off a raging crash, which eventually involved at least eight cars and left Clint Bowyer to come across the finish line upside down.
NASCAR officials, however, were apparently transfixed by the battle for victory. This, again, was the Daytona 500.
Cars aren’t allowed to race back to the caution, even on the last lap. But that rule only applies if the caution actually is put out, and until Harvick flashed across the finish line about a third of a car-length in front of Martin, none was.
“When the 07 car went sideways across the track, the yellow came out,” NASCAR spokesman Ramsey Poston said afterward.
“The cars involved in the earlier part of the incident were on the apron and off the track.”
That point is, to put it charitably, debatable. Martin said he kept waiting and waiting to see a yellow and was confident he was ahead at the time he was looking for it.
Harvick wasn’t in charge of whether the yellow should be thrown or not. He had his own job to do.
“I just held the pedal down and hoped for the best,” Harvick said. “I knew I was going to be the bad guy there with Mark leading. That’s just the way it works.”
Martin clearly thought he was going to see a yellow, but he said he absolutely never lifted his foot of the floor, either. As big as his disappointment was, he took solace in knowing he’d done all he could do.
But it still hurt, and he still could have fanned the flames of the controversy over the end-race call. He chose not to.
“Nobody wants to hear a grown man cry, all right?” Martin said. “This is what it is and that’s it. That’s the end. They made the decision and that’s what we’re going to live with.”
Six years ago, car owner Richard Childress saw his driver and close friend Dale Earnhardt die in a crash on the final lap of this race. He said after Harvick won the Busch race on Saturday that he felt like standing on a table and letting out a scream of joy, and he couldn’t resist a little bit of the scream part Sunday night.
Right after the victory, when Childress and Harvick saw each other for the first time, there was really only one thing to say.
“He just kept looking at me,” Harvick said, “and saying, ‘Man, can you believe it? This is the Daytona 500.”