The first practice for the Sprint Unlimited is in the books and Kevin Harvick topped the speed chart while Matt Kenseth triggered a four-car wreck.
Harvick topped the charts in his No. 29 Budweiser Chevrolet with a speed of 197.394 mph.
“Our Budweiser Chevy was right in the middle of the hornet’s nest and was able to get out of there,” Harvick said. “Need to work on corner speed and pulling up and the only way to do that is to get in a pack.”
Aric Almirola was second, followed by Greg Biffle, Kasey Kahne and Dale Earnhardt Jr.
Meanwhile, Kenseth triggered a five-car wreck involving Mark Martin, Kurt Busch, Juan Pablo Montoya and Carl Edwards. While in the draft, Busch went low, then Kenseth went high and tried to come back down, but instead got into the back of Busch.
“It can be repaired,” Martin said. “It’ll need to go home to get repaired. With the way the templates are, it’ll need to go home. We’ve got plenty of racecars, we came down prepared.”
“It’s tough,” Busch said. “A lot o hardwork goes into these cars in six weeks, just to get wrecked in six laps. He went high, I went low and he came down right across my nose.”
“I had no idea was he there,” Kenseth said, taking the blame for the wreck. “I had no idea anyone was even close to me.”
Busch, Edwards and Martin are headed to back-up cars while Kenseth and Montoya are trying to fix their’s.
Last year’s Sprint Unlimited winner Kyle Busch was 10th in practice.
“Things with the M&M Camry seem to be good,” Busch said. “It’s unfortunate that our teammate Matt Kenseth was caught up in that wreck. Hopefully it doesn’t hurt our fleet too much. All in all, as soon as we seen one wreck, everybody played chicken and didn’t go out after that.”
A second practice will be taking place at 6:30pm EST while the Sprint Unlimited is set to be run on Saturday night.
