Flashback Friday: Kevin Harvick wins first race in photo finish

By foxsports
Published

March 11, 2001, is a day Kevin Harvick will never forget, even if some of the details remain fuzzy. 

Kevin Harvick stands with the trophy in Victory Lane at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

On that day, just three weeks after Dale Earnhardt perished in a last-lap crash at Daytona International Speedway, Harvick won his first NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

At Atlanta, Harvick beat Jeff Gordon to the finish line by 0.006 seconds in the fifth-closest finish in NASCAR history since the advent of electric timing and scoring in 1993. The victory in the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store 500 came in Harvick's third Cup start. 

"I think for us it's obviously something that you can't do twice," Harvick would say later. "To win your first race is something that's pretty cool. To do it in our third start, with everything that was going on, you can really look back on it now and reflect on those types of things."