After all that, he ended up in Victory Lane - again.

Harvick won the exhibition race at Daytona International Speedway for the second consecutive year by moving from fourth to first and passing leader Greg Biffle with two laps remaining in Saturday night's kickoff race to Speedweeks. Biffle's wreck moments later ended the race under caution, giving Harvick his first win since the Shootout victory a year ago.

He hasn't won a points race since the 2007 season-opening Daytona 500, and was not ready to proclaim his win a precursor for a repeat in next week's 500.

"I know we started last year the same way," he said of the 2009 Shootout win - the lone bright spot in an otherwise dismal season for Harvick.

There was a sense of electricity surrounding the first event of Speedweeks, a race everyone expected to be so rough-and-tumble that NASCAR's relaxed rules toward aggressive driving would most certainly be tested.

Instead, the race was more like a cease-fire.

The bumping and banging that's become the trademark of Daytona and Talladega wasn't too intense until the closing laps. The slicing and dicing of drivers weaving through the field seemed minimal.

And the opportunity to dazzle fans with a spectacular Daytona 500 preview was lost.

"It wasn't nearly as crazy as I thought it would be," said fifth-place finisher Denny Hamlin. "You would've liked to have seen a little bit more excitement."

That's because NASCAR all but promised as much by lifting the restrictions on bump-drafting and allowing drivers to mix it up more on the track. Series officials had progressively squeezed out bump-drafting - the practice of one car shoving the car in front of it to push each other through the field at Daytona and Talladega - but decided to let the drivers police themselves after complaints of sterilized racing at NASCAR's fastest two tracks.

IndyCar star Danica Patrick is expected to announce today if she will enter the Nationwide Series race at Daytona. She rallied from a midrace spin in Saturday's ARCA race at Daytona to finish sixth in her stock-car debut.