Photo Credit: Noel Lanier
REID SPENCER/NASCAR WIRE SERVICE —– DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Kevin Harvick acknowledges having watched the closing laps of the 2007 Daytona 500 more than a few times.
“I’ve seen it a lot,” Harvick said on Tuesday at Daytona.
There’s good reason to enjoy that race over and over again—and not just because Harvick happened to take the checkered flag in the Great American Race for the only time in his career.
The 2007 Daytona 500 was one of the most exciting in the long history of the event, with Harvick beating Mark Martin to the finish line by .005 seconds at the end of a green-white-checkered-flag finish.
In fact, Harvick made a phenomenal all-out run around the outside in the final two laps just to get into position to win the race.
“Yeah, it still gives me goosebumps every time that I see it happen, because it’s one of those moments where you didn’t really expect to be in that position with everything that had happened 12, 15 laps before that,” Harvick said.
“I think as you see everything unfold, you see it coming to the line, then win the race. When you go back to remembering what it was like inside of the car, how excited you were, all the things you got to do the next week, it was pretty neat.”
To Harvick, it was confirmation of just how fickle the Daytona 500 can be.
“It’s hard to put any race together, let alone this one,” he said. “There’s just so many things that have to go your way. I think that year was probably a year that you didn’t think you probably had the car to win.
“I can think of a few years where it felt like you had the car to win and you didn’t win because of something going wrong. You never know when it’s all going to line up. You have to keep trying to plug away and keep yourself in contention.”
