No driver counted out Harvick
Now rest of Chase field may regret failure to beat him.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — No one would have blamed a championship contender for getting just a little bit excited when Kevin Harvick wrecked during the opening race of the Chase for the Sprint Cup.
And it would have been understandable if a driver or two had started salivating a bit when Harvick ran out of gas while leading the very next week. The reigning Sprint Cup champion had been backed deep into a corner.
Unless he overcame some pretty heavy odds, he’d be knocked out of the way in the race for the championship.
Funny thing is, not a single driver in the Chase field counted Harvick out. They all knew better than to believe Harvick wouldn’t put up an epic fight, at a track where he’d never won before, where anything short of a victory would end his bid to win consecutive titles.
Indeed, Harvick put on a clinic Sunday at Dover International Speedway, where he led all but 45 of the 400 laps to grab his first career win on the Delaware concrete. He was in complete control from start to finish, he pulled away from the pack on every restart and he won in such convincing fashion that the rest of the field should have been embarrassed.
The win earned Harvick the automatic berth he needed into the second round of the Chase. That achievement was lost on no one.
“That was a guy that we wanted to knock out. That’s a guy that can win all these races, and you don’t want to have to compete against a guy like that,” said Kyle Busch, who started the 10-race Chase as the top seed but has been outrun each week by Harvick.
Harvick’s win at Dover should be frightening to the 11 remaining title contenders heading into Saturday night’s race at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
In the days leading into Dover, crew chief Rodney Childers presented an interesting what-if:
He wondered what the fallout would be should Harvick lap every car in the field, and Childers asked it in a way that made it sound as if the Stewart-Haas Racing team had been holding something back.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. more or less confirmed that last week when he pondered the idea that Harvick could be eliminated from the Chase in the first round.
But he noted that the reigning champion, in nearly every practice session of the season, was “really embarrassing the heck out of everybody.”
Yet Harvick went into the Chase with only two wins (though with 10 second-place finishes) and had been outrun to a large degree during the summer by Joe Gibbs Racing’s strong four-car contingent.
After the way he drove at Dover — like he owned the place, really — could it be Harvick has simply been toying with his challengers all year?
It sure sounded that way as he opened his postrace news conference.
“Yeah, I don’t think there was really any pressure,” Harvick said, “You know, all in all, it was business as usual.”
Business as usual may very well mean the rest of the field is running for second place in this Chase.