Kevin Harvick is NASCAR’s resident master of Phoenix, having won seven races including five of the past seven at the 1-mile track. Harvick finished second in a rain-shortened race at PIR last fall. Dale Earnhardt Jr. is a three-time winner at Phoenix, his most recent victory at the desert oval coming in a rain-shortened race last November. Junior’s two other wins here came in his days with Dale Earnhardt Inc. Matt Kenseth has been in contention to win each of the three races run so far in 2016 but has fallen well short each time. No one comes to Phoenix hungrier than…

By Jared Turner NASCAR’s visit to Phoenix International Raceway for Sunday’s Good Sam 500 marks the second of three stops on the appropriately named West Coast Swing. Now in its second year of existence, the West Coast Swing features consecutive Sprint Cup Series races at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, PIR and Auto Club Speedway in California, which all come in the month of March. NASCAR’s impetus for implementing a West Coast Swing was two-fold: To save teams and drivers precious travel time by allowing them to remain out west for two weeks rather than having to go back and forth between coasts.…

By Jerry Bonkowski Can someone figure out what’s going on with Matt Kenseth? Whatever it is, it’s all been wrong, wrong, wrong thus far in the 2016 Sprint Cup season. Kenseth led 40 laps in the season-opening Daytona 500, only to fade on the last lap and finish a disappointing 14th. At Atlanta, after leading 47 laps, Kenseth was black-flagged for an inadvertent pit crew mistake, failed to see the flag in time (or potentially ignored it) and wound up losing two laps due to penalty, resulting in yet another disappointing outing, this time 19th. But nothing could have been more disappointing…