Harvick once again weathers adversity
Kevin Harvick’s Sprint Cup title defense remained extremely eventful but very much in progress Sunday at Texas Motor Speedway.
Despite sustaining two punctured tires and a broken shifter that required him to manually hold the No. 4 Chevrolet in gear for nearly 100 laps, Harvick rallied to finish third and climb a rung to third in the standings with one race left in this third elimination round of the Chase for the Sprint Cup.
The better news for Harvick: The round ends next week at Phoenix International Raceway, where he has won four races in a row and five of the last six.
Seemingly unfazed and with enough vigor in his right arm to squeeze a postrace drink from a sipper bottle, Harvick wasn’t counting himself into the championship finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway. There are still concerns. But he couldn’t feel poorly about his lot, either.
“It’s definitely a good place for us to go,” he said of Phoenix. “It’s been very successful. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to go there and run good this time. We’ve got to go and try and have our ducks in a row. We’ve done a good job managing the Chase so far with all the adversity we’ve had. We’ve only really had one smooth weekend, so we’ve just got to keep doing what we’re doing and hopefully the smooth weekend is the next week and the week after.”
Harvick has been bedeviled in this Chase, with problems at almost every track except Dover In- ternational Speedway, where he dominated in victory to leap from outside the Chase boundary into second-round viability. Embroiled in controversy at Talladega Superspeedway because of his prompting of an accident on the final green-white-checkered restart that helped advance him to this round, Harvick finished eighth at Martinsville Speedway.
Perhaps out of habit developed in the last eight races, Harvick found the good fortune in the stressful details.
“It was one of those days when not giving up paid off,” he said.
There still are problems and concerns, and continued transmission maladies threaten to undo the perseverance Harvick and his team have exhibited. Crew chief Rodney Childers said it was unclear what caused the car to come out of gear in the unusual circumstance of under acceleration out of a corner.
“Bottom line is, you can’t have mistakes like that if you’re going to win a championship,” he told USA TODAY Sports. “We’ve got some work to do.
“Overall, we’ve had way too many transmission problems since I went to work over here (at Stewart-Haas Racing). We’re going to have to do something a little different there.”
And doing something a little different — as in enjoying an event-free race or two — would be welcomed for Childers and Harvick. The team won at Phoenix last fall to snag a berth in the final and claimed the title with a win at Homestead.
That smooth weekend idea of Harvick’s sounded good to Childers.
“Hopefully they’re both smooth; hopefully they’re both wins,” Childers said.