Kevin Harvick will face adversity from the drop of the green flag.
The No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford will start from the rear and serve a pass-through penalty at the start of Sunday’s Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway after three failures in pre-race technical inspection. NASCAR also ejected team engineer Billy Kuebler from the garage.
They will also serve a 30-minute practice hold next weekend at Richmond Raceway. The team passed inspection on its fourth time through.
Crew chief Rodney Childers said that once they failed once, the corrections essentially sabotaged other areas of the car.
"I've seen some other people get roped into this here over the years," Childers told a pair of reporters before the start of the race. "We've personally never gone through it. We went through it the first time and the right rear camber was .03 of a degree too much. We went back and changed the sleeve to correct the camber, didn't change anything else, didn't even put the car on jack stands and went back there and the right rear toe was wrong by .01 of a degree.
"We come back and move the truck arm slot to fix that and the left rear camber was wrong. Once you fail once, it's easy to get roped into being wrong somewhere else."
Kevin Harvick qualified 13th for Sunday’s race and he led 10-lap averages in second practice. In 36 starts at Bristol in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series, Harvick has two victories and 19 top-10 finishes.
Childers also said he doesn’t expect the car to lose speed.
"You’ll see," Childers said.
Stewart-Haas Racing competition director Greg Zipadelli met with NASCAR officials in the minutes leading up to the green flag to better understand what happened.
The failures come one week after Harvick told a group of reporters that his team had fallen behind the likes of Joe Gibbs Racing and Team Penske.
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