By Aaron Bearden, Motorsports Editor
HAMPTON, Ga. — With the laps winding down in Sunday’s Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500, it appeared near-certain that Kevin Harvick would be the one to take home the checkered flag.
But even if he were to falter, it would have been a Ford pulling into victory lane.
The Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series’ lone trip to Atlanta Motor Speedway was a Ford-dominated affair, contested chiefly between Harvick and defending race winner Brad Keselowski as their Toyota and Chevrolet counterparts struggled to keep up.
The duo combined to take an easy one-two result in the track’s lone 2018 race, with Clint Bowyer following in third to give the manufacturer a clean sweep of the top three. Joey Logano (sixth) and Kurt Busch (eighth) also capped off good runs to give the Blue Ovals half of the top 10.
“Fords were good all weekend long,” Bowyer said of the Blue Oval success. “It wasn’t just today, it was unloading off the trucks. It was neat to see all four Stewart-Haas cars in the top 10 qualifying.
“Everybody is working hard. You’ve got another manufacturer that got a new body, of course, over the off-season; that makes you a little bit nervous. But so far, so good. We were as good as anybody, obviously.
The run was Ford’s strongest in recent memory, and stood in stark contrast to sentiments of runner-up Keselowski, who once said that Ford would “take a drubbing” this season if Chevrolet’s new Camaro ZL1 matched Toyota’s current offering and Ford didn’t innovate.
Sunday’s race also marked the first time the Cup Series field has had back-to-back events without a Toyota win since Sonoma Raceway and Daytona International Speedway in June and July of 2017. Fourth-place finisher Denny Hamlin poked fun at Keselowski with a joke about comments he made during Toyota’s stretch of success, jokingly saying “It’s clear the Fords have an unfair advantage.”
The cause of Ford’s unexpected Atlanta success could stem from a litany of areas. The new Optical Scanning Station utilized for pre and post-race inspection has led to confusion about what teams can and can’t get away with, leading defending champion and intermediate track ace Martin Truex Jr. to rise from the back of the field after failing pre-qualifying inspection three times on Friday.
The abrasive surface of Atlanta’s aged 1.5-mile oval also removed some of the motor and aerodynamic dependency of the cars relative to other tracks, placing greater emphasis on handling and managing tire wear. The top 10 were filled with experience drivers that knew how to manage their tire weather for the event’s 325 laps. The emphasis on experience favored Ford, who fill the majority of their roster with veterans at both SHR and Team Penske.
“You know, this is a racetrack that takes a lot of experience,” Harvick said. “And there’s a lot of things that you have to know about your car and know about the racetrack to get the car around the racetrack. This is where experience pays off at these types of racetracks for sure.”
Bowyer echoed his teammate’s sentiments, saying “It’s just an old-school racetrack. You’ve got to take care of your stuff, and this is the way — Denny and I came in pretty much at the same time. This is the way most of the tracks were, and how you learned from the guys that we were learning from, the Jeff Gordons and all those guys.”
Regardless of the cause of their success, Ford left Atlanta celebrating one of the strongest weekends they’ve had at an intermediate track in recent history.
But will it translate to additional success?
According to Keselowski, the variety of the season’s early stages make it impossible to gauge before the West Coast Swing.
“I think we’re just so early in the season, and Atlanta is a big outlier in the season, but so is (ISM Raceway),” he said. “It’s really to me, when you get through the Californias and the Las Vegases, you see who’s got what.”