OXFORD, Maine -- Sometime during one of the several rain delays this weekend, Kevin Harvick was thinking back to how he got the hair-brained idea to run the TD Banknorth 250 in the first place.

Having a Friday test session at Oxford Plains Speedway cut short by rain, most all of Sunday’s originally-scheduled program washed out and then enduring a three-hour rain delay on Monday prior to the start of the main event was probably enough to convince Harvick that a Maine vacation wasn’t the best way to go.

But going home with a 6-foot-tall trophy and a check for $37,300 somehow made it all worth it as Harvick led a total of 123 laps to win the TD Banknorth 250 in his first career attempt. Crew chief Shane Wilson, who works for Richard Childress Racing in its research and development branch, was the one who convinced Harvick to run the race.

"He’s from Vermont, so he’s come up here and not run very well a lot, I guess," said Harvick, who has won at both Daytona and Indianapolis in his Sprint Cup career. "(Wilson) wanted to come up here and win.

"It was his idea. We had one too many beers at the house one night, and it was his idea to do this."

Harvick started 11^th in the 41-car field and never led at any point in the first half of the event. But because the track received so much rain over a four-day period, race director Randy Varney instituted a five-minute break with a competition caution at the midway point to alleviate pit road traffic in soggy conditions.

Harvick restarted the race second behind early leader Eddie MacDonald, and he and MacDonald swapped the lead on a couple of occasions before Harvick took it for good on lap 133.

He was never challenged seriously again, though Joey Polewarczyk used the outside groove to gain ground on Harvick before lap 200 and Glen Luce then tried to track him down with 25 laps remaining.

Luce, of nearby Turner, would settle for second, a career day, after he couldn’t capitalize on the race’s final restart with 10 laps remaining. He said his car was too tight, even after an adjustment during the pit stop to free the car up.

"If we’d have gone a little bit more on the track bar up, and (Brian Craig), the crew chief, he wanted too," Luce said. "I’ve got to have a little more faith in him. I was questioning that, but I wish we’d taken a little bit more. It was just too tight."

In all, 18 cars finished on the lead lap in a race slowed 13 times by the caution flag. Former track Late Model champion Shawn Martin finished fourth, and two-time ‘250' champion Ben Rowe was fifth.

MacDonald led a total of 121 laps, but his car wasn’t as strong after pitting on lap 126 and he settled for eighth spot.

Even with all the rain, Harvick wasn’t soured on his Oxford 250 experience.

"(My wife’s) father, he raced a long time and came up here several times and never made the race, and that was one of the reasons why we came up here," said Harvick, who became the third straight driver – after Jeremie Whorff and Roger Brown – to win the ‘250' in his first appearance. "Some of the great stories that they had as a family traveling up and down the coast and coming up here to race. It was a lot of good reasons to come up here. The people up here have just been awesome."

But not awesome enough to come back right away.

"I’d love to come back, but I’m not coming back next year, though," Harvick said. "(OPS owner Bill Ryan) and I have already talked about this, but we’ll be back at some point in the future. I love to run at different race tracks I haven’t been to, and that’s what we’ll do again next year. Just find somewhere different and meet a lot of the different people."