Kevin Harvick's Happy Hour presented by NASCAR on FOX - Pit Stop: Kevin Harvick reacts to Toyota’s struggling strategy at Talladega

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

Join NASCAR legend Kevin Harvick alongside Kaitlyn Vincie and Mamba Smith on the latest episode of “Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour” presented by NASCAR on FOX as the crew breaks down Toyotas strategy at Talladega Motor Speedway. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hard impacts. And I mean, we talked about it off camera. Just what those are like in this car, it's very serious. And, you know, the Josh Barry incident, the Corey the Joy incident, those cars, when they get up in the air like that and slam back into the ground, it feels like somebody just takes a punch and hammers it right through your spine. It is violent. Eric Jones's hit was violent. It blew the air cleaner off. It blew the hood off.

And, you know, I think that, you know, he was, he was, see all those cars getting missed a lot. He was definitely over 160 miles an hour, I'd say, if not more, when he hit that fence like that. And those right angles and hits like that are just really, really tough. And with this Gen 7 car, they are just much more violent. It doesn't look like it on the videos until you slow them down tremendously. There's actually a camera inside the car, a high-speed camera that takes it frame by frame a lot faster than you know, a lot of the other cameras can. But even when we slow it down for television with the cameras we have,

it just you really see the body move. And so what happens with these cars, the old car had a ramp-up process that is pretty flat, right? So from a second standpoint, you know, you go from here to the end of the wreck, the slope of the impact is absorbed by the car like this. This car is absorbed like this. So basically, when you hit something now,

It's like it happens so fast. So like in a whip blast situation, it just happens a lot faster because a lot of that, a lot of that impact is going through your body because it just, the whip is whipped faster is, I guess, one way to explain it. So it just becomes much more violent for the driver. And that Eric Jones shot was, that was big. And you obviously know now he's been in and out of the hospital trying to figure out what's wrong. we've seen the concussions.

So definitely still have a lot of work to do with this car to put these drivers in a better position to absorb these impacts. Obviously, he's, you know, he's hurt and they're planning for the catastrophic impact. But definitely still some work to do. We're obviously thinking about him and hoping that he will recover from everything that's going on. What did you think when you saw this strategy from the Toyotas? And Tyler Reddick said after the race, there was just a bad energy, he said at that point in the race. he was experiencing it. Yeah.

So I'm sitting, shout out to Fox for letting my dad go to the suite. That was awesome. This is his first holiday a race. He had a great time. Nice. But I'm sitting there with him and we're watching. And I'm like, the Toyos are going to wreck. Because it was like the lap before that.

They had come down the front stretch and they were just dancing around. Like the guys right by, I guess it was Eric Jones and like Bubba. And they were just moving around a lot. And I'm like, it seems like they're just not settled in to what they were doing. And they get down over to. three that next lab and it all hell broke loose. And that hit was so quick and so hard. It reminds me of Blaney's,

that the couple that Blaney's had over the last few years and Blaney took a shot at Daytona that was like that. And I think that was faster than the Blaney one. Because you're still driving the car at that point. You're still in the gas and still, and he's chasing it. And then it just was in the fence. So that one was really hard.

Thinking about Eric Jones, making sure hopefully recovers very quickly and he'll be back in the car. Yeah. Referencing the Reddit comment about the bad energy, can you immediately feel that as the driver as it's unfolding? Well, I think that their cars don't seem to be able to be pushed as well. Yeah, as the Ford's for sure. But it seems like they're the worst cars to push.

You know, that last year, they fixed the front of their Camry this year to make it flat so they could be a good pusher. But it just doesn't seem like they've got the back of the car settled. and when you're trying to make time like that, you know you have to push. And the more tightly compacted you can keep that line, the faster the lap time is going to be. And up until that point,

they were faster than the pack for a couple laps before that. But man, it ended in just an embarrassing set of circumstances. Do you think the back bumper is... It's just rounder. Yeah, it's rounded. So like when they're trying to push, it just doesn't line up the way it probably needs to.

Yeah. Well, there's just the same. center of that curve is, you know, your margin of air is small. Right. So being able to push that car straight, and that's why when it got to bouncing around over those bumps and their nose to tail pushing each other, but you got to know over those bumps, like I would always try to let a guy go unless it was, like you had to have a little breather right there in order to get them over the bumps.

And I think they just got too greedy. Martin Trex, Jr, one of the Joe Gibbs racing drivers, of course. He finished 11th, but he was battling radio interference. issues throughout the course of the race. Is there anywhere worse to have maybe limited communication with your spotter? I mean, that's a ordeal. It was a bad deal for, it seemed like about half the field. And I don't know what was going on at Talladega over the weekend, but there was a lot of radio interference for a lot of cars in the field. So it'll be interesting to see how the, the, the teams and radio company and NASCAR decide to, as to what was wrong with everything on that

particular weekend because it was it was static it was people coming over the radio and and but you depend on your spotter so much at these style of racetracks to be able to do what you need to do and you know make the moves like michael mcd tried to make at the end of the race to as to whether you're clear not clear which lanes moving which lane's not moving uh so it it is it is not a fun situation very very annoying as a driver and and frustrating as well yeah well at least he's still got 11th place out of that. He was there at the end too. I mean, without him, Redick doesn't win.

Redick doesn't win, right? Because that was his last team. That was really his last team, right? I think if McDowell doesn't go all the way to the bottom, I think they put him three wide and he gets in the sucker hole. You know what I mean? Like, how do you not throw in the block and let Brad to the inside? The 19 and the 45 were far enough back to where they could have still maneuvered around

him. Yeah. It's terrible spot to be in. Defense is not right. do what you got to do in those situations. Hey, race fans. Thanks for watching our video for all NASCAR on Fox News, content, and the best clips from Fox Sports.

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