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Stewart-Haas Racing drivers have roller coaster day at Bristol

Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series O'Reilly Auto Parts 500 - Qualifying

FORT WORTH, TX - MARCH 29: Kevin Harvick, driver of the #4 Mobil 1/O’Reilly Auto Parts Ford, stands by his car during qualifying for the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series O’Reilly Auto Parts 500 at Texas Motor Speedway on March 29, 2019 in Fort Worth, Texas. (Photo by Matt Sullivan/Getty Images)

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Racing at Bristol Motor Speedway for NASCAR Cup teams can often be like riding a roller coaster: up and down, side to side and forward and backward.

That’s the perfect description for how Sunday’s Food City 500 went for Stewart-Haas Racing.

Here’s how the day went for the organization:

* found himselfbehind the eight ballevenbefore the green flagfell.Harvick’s car failed to pass pre-race inspection three times,leading to his engineer being ejected from the track.

Harvick then had to perform a pass-through penalty at the start for the inspection issue. There was a silver lining, as he avoided the wreck on Lap 3 that involved teammate Aric Almirola, as well as Ricky Stenhouse Jr., William Byron, Kyle Busch and Ryan Preece.

Later in the race,Harvick had to make an unscheduled pit stop due to a loose wheel .

To their credit, however, Harvick and crew chief Rodney Childers ended up with a 13th-place finish.Harvick did not offer any quotes on his day after the race.

* Clint Bowyer was the highest-finishing SHR driver, ending up seventh, but he was disappointed afterward because he felt he should have finished in the top five, which didn’t happenprimarily due to late-race contact with Joey Logano.

That contact led to a cut tire for Bowyer, who clipped the wall, ending his chance for a top five.

“We had a good car, it’s just horribly disappointingg,” Bowyer said. “You get that close. Long runs were my strong suit. I couldn’t take off all day long. Some of those things made sense. We were down a little bit on air and it took a little bit of time for them to come in. The problem is when you balance around that and you just pump the air-pressure up, then it doesn’t work either and you don’t handle there. It’s just disappointing.”

Still, Bowyer said the contact with Logano was just a racing deal.

He was racing me pretty hard,” Bowyer said. “I could get under him. I saw that I could get under him and he would diamond it and just didn’t leave me much room there. It’s time to race. There’s no question about it. We just barely touched and it must have cut the valve stem out of it or something and hit it just right. Maybe his fender caught it or something, I don’t know.

“That’s about typical luck for here. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. We put ourselves in position.”

* Daniel Suarez extended his streak of top 10 finishes to three straight races with an eighth-place showing. But he also had struggles at times, including being assessed a one-lap penalty for pitting outside his pit box when a crew member pulled tape off the front grill as the car was leaving the stall and the action was performed outside the box.

“Today was difficult,” Suarez admitted. “We made a lot of mistakes that we were lucky to overcome and finish in the top 10. I’m proud of that. We have to keep better, but it’s kind of good that we’re making these mistakes now so we can clean them up and be stronger in the second part of the season. We have a very good team. We have great race cars and it’s always good to perform well. Today, we had a lot of speed. I felt like we had top five speed at times and when we’re not very good we have top 10 speed and that’s where we ended up, so after all of those mistakes it was still a decent day.”

* Having the roughest day of all – watching it end just after three laps – was Aric Almirola, whose streak of six consecutive top 10 finishes come to an end with a last-place (37th) finish.

Almirola was forced into the wall on Lap 3 when William Byron came off a corner and rode up into Almirola’s No. 10 Ford. Almirola took his car to the garage, ending his day.

“The 24 (William Byron) just got loose under me,” Almirola said. “He struggled to get going on the initial start. He spun his tires and then was just loose and out of control that whole first lap. When we went down in Turn 1, he lost it under me and wiped us out. I’m pretty frustrated. You work all weekend, all week getting ready for the event and to make it one lap is kind of uncalled for, so I’m disappointed, frustrated, but life goes on. We’ll go to Richmond.”

Almirola felt the incident was due to “some of it is inexperience on William’s part. I think he started to panic because he started to lose spots on the start because he spun his tires on the start, and probably a little bit over his head with the tire pressures and everything not coming up and he just lost it. He got loose underneath me, lost it and ran right into the side of us and wrecked us. Part of that comes with experience, I guess, but, either way, it doesn’t change the outcome for us today.”

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