(photo courtesy Leon Hammack)
The final 10 minutes of Saturday morning’s Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series practice at Auto Club Speedway provided unwelcomed excitement for drivers Kevin “Happy” Harvick and David Ragan.
With roughly 10 minutes left in the 55-minute early-morning session, Harvick’s No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford Fusion scraped the wall in Turn 4.
Harvick drove the car back to the garage, where the team began repairing the cosmetic damage to the right side to avoid going to a backup car and losing the seventh-place starting position earned in Friday’s qualifying session.
With three body men at the race track, the No. 4 team had ample time to fix the damage.
Ragan wasn’t as lucky. With time running out in the session, the driver of the No. 38 Front Row Motorsports Ford Fusion pounded the Turn 3 wall after cutting a tire and destroyed the race car.
Forced to use a backup, Ragan will drop from his 27th starting position to the rear of the field for the green flag in Sunday’s Auto Club 400.
“We just cut a left-rear tire going down the back straightaway, and I tried to start slowing it down as quick as I could and just couldn’t slow it down fast enough,” Ragan said of the incident. “By the time I got to Turn 3, I was wrecking before I even got to the corner.
“It’s certainly unfortunate. I felt like our Camping World Ford was pretty decent. We made a few adjustments and hadn’t put new tires on yet, and I felt like our speeds hadn’t fallen off a lot, so it’s unfortunate.”
TIL NEXT TIME, I AM STILL WORKING ON MY REDNECK!
