Teams and drivers can sometimes take a while to get into the groove of the NASCAR Cup Series season, especially when it’s the beginning of a new season. So it isn’t uncommon to see a lot of mistakes in the opening few weeks of the competition, even by veteran racers. And that is exactly what Kevin Harvick believes happened at the Pennzoil 400 on Sunday, as there were several mistakes involving the pits. Hometown favorite Kyle Busch, who was running the top five throughout the event, had his race ruined by a pit stop error.

Rowdy’s car splitter was just over the line of the pit box, which resulted in him serving a penalty and losing the position he had worked for in the race. But it was not just the former Cup Series champion who faced issues. Austin Cindric was one of the drivers who struggled to navigate his car on the pit road, as was William Byron. The HMS man cut a frustrated figure for a large portion of the race due to that.

Kevin Harvick not surprised by Cup Series racers making rookie mistakes

Kevin Harvick understands what these drivers are going through better than most NASCAR insiders, and The Closer said that he was not surprised one bit with the kind of mistakes he saw. On a recent episode of his Happy Hour podcast, the former Cup Series champion attributed the mistakes to a lack of rhythm in the teams since it’s the start of the season. Harvick believes that things will improve as the season rolls on, but mistakes in the beginning were not uncommon at all.

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Another point to note is the race was at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, the first unrestricted race of the year. On superspeedways, the tracks might be larger, but drivers could not use all of their horsepower. But given how things are different here, getting used to that style of driving might have also taken some time. As The Closer recalled, the pit box in Vegas is slippery.

“You always see early in the year, a ton of mistakes. As we go throughout the year, yeah there are gonna be mistakes here and there, but when we get…probably for the first 7 to 10 weeks, there’s just gonna be a lot of mistakes because guys are not in rhythm. Vegas is a really fast track, it’s really the first unrestricted race track that we have raced on this year with that style of downforce and horsepower. But Vegas is a tricky pit road. It’s hard to get on to pit road correctly. You have some corners in the middle of pit road with the quad-oval there that you have to navigate the pit road speed but the pit box is really slippery and that’s something that I always practiced before the race would start in practice,” the former Stewart-Haas Racing driver explained.

Apart from Kyle Busch, William Byron was also one of the racers who had trouble on pit road but Kevin Harvick empathized with the Hendrick Motorsports star a lot more than he did with his former rival.

Kevin Harvick empathizes with William Byron as he recalls bizarre Texas experience

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The driver of the #24 had one of the most unusual races of his Cup Series career, and it was not fun. Byron had a foreign object latch onto his car’s front grill, more specifically, a trash bag. The winner of the Daytona 500 had a pretty frustrating evening because of that and issues on the pit road with his team. The Closer related to the 26-year-old as he is no stranger to foreign objects getting stuck on his car as he recalled an incident from when he was racing in Texas.

“One time we were at Texas and we came in from the race. This is not a lie, I promise you this is a true story. Came in from Texas and there was a $100 bill on my grill screen, that was just hanging there. We didn’t frame it. One of the guys on the team actually works on my Late Model team now, actually is the one who took it off the grill. He kept it. You come in a lot of times and there’ll be razor blades stuck in the nose. Stuff that goes through and is just stuck in the nose. That was the most random thing I ever had, was a $100 bill on my grill,” he recalled.

Any other object would have been frustrating, but a driver perhaps would not refuse to pocket a $100 bill if one ever got stuck anywhere on their car while they were racing. Certainly, that’s better than a garbage bag.

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