With the presentation of the Next Gen vehicle, all NASCAR crews and drivers are going through a kind of intense stage in acclimating to it. In any case, it’s just normal.
The new vehicle is so profoundly unique that the main thing normal between the old vehicle and this one are the seats. So finding a workable pace with an interaction won’t just take time however ought to be finished with “good judgment”. Basically that is what Kevin Harvick feels.
In a meeting with Speedway Digest, Harvick talked about the ‘benefit’ his 22 years of involvement with the game has with stepping in the new vehicle.
“Today’s sport is so engineering-minded that the simple, everyday things sometimes get forgotten. It’s very important to do all the little things right, and you have to execute the simple things right too,” Harvick said.
“Don’t overcomplicate it, because sometimes overcomplicating results in a worse result than just say, ‘OK, today we finished fifth and next week we’re going to try to do two or three things to finish first, not 20 or 30 things and finish 30th.”
Harvick, who got destroyed out of last Sunday’s Daytona 500 and completed 30th, accepts the two-mile track will demonstrate an “forceful” test for the new-sized tires, which include a much lower-profiled sidewall.
He trusts that no measure of pre-race reenactment can plan for the requests that lie ahead in this Sunday’s 400-miler in California.
“I think for Fontana, because it’s the first one, you’ll be prepared from the shop,” said Harvick. “When you go from the first race to the second race to the third race, you’re probably going to spend some time in one of those two racetracks’ garages working on the vehicle, preparing it for the next week.
“So our trailers and things are prepared well, but it’s not like working in your shop. There’s going to be a lot of racetrack garage and parking lot work that will go on.
“Between the Daytona 500 and the West Coast swing, you can put a huge damper on the first half of your year if you’re not careful, just because of the fact that the progression with the car has to be there. If everything’s torn up, the progression of the car slows down because our sport is all about details, and you can’t detail the car to the point that it needs to be detailed in order to make it run as fast as it needs to run.
Kevin Harvick is of the opinion that tire the board will be the way to progress at Fontana, as the track hasn’t been reemerged since it was worked in 1997.