Kevin Harvick focused on results – ESPN
LOUDON, N.H. — As reporters chased Kevin Harvick as he walked through the garage Friday to ask him about his jab of Jimmie Johnson, Harvick tried to ignore them while also trying to appease the fans handing him items to sign at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
At one point, Harvick put his hand up to grab what he thought was a piece of paper that was just to the side of his head. It was a reporter’s digital recorder, and Harvick nearly grabbed it out of the reporter’s hand.
Harvick chuckled a bit. “Sorry,” he said with a smile.
That moment typified the tense, yet relaxed atmosphere of the Harvick camp heading into the Sylvania 300 on Sunday for the second race of the three-race Challenger Round that opens the Chase For The Sprint Cup. The defending Sprint Cup champion was trying to limit distractions, and that meant not doing any interviews he wasn’t required to do. He has a big job ahead of him.
But he still had the ability to laugh a little bit, too. If this championship run is meant to be, it will last another nine weeks. There is no way a driver can go nine consecutive weekends without at least cracking a smile.
It’s not that Harvick is cocky. It’s just that what lies ahead of him is definitely doable. He just has to do his best, if possible, to put what happened last week with Johnson out of his memory.
Should Harvick have given up position on the track when he and Johnson battled for the lead midway through the Chase for the Sprint Cup opener last Sunday at Chicagoland? Should Harvick have pitted once he and his crew figured out his No. 4 Chevrolet had a tire rub instead of risking it, staying out and eventually wrecking on his way to a 42nd-place finish?
“I don’t look back,” he said when asked about whether his problem is self-inflicted. “I just do what we have to do to focus on what we need to do looking forward.”
Harvick is focused, but not surly. He knows he needs two strong races to rebound from Chicagoland, which has left him 22 points behind 12th-place Jeff Gordon – and, if nothing changes, on the outside looking in when the Chase field is cut from 16 to 12 following the Oct. 4 race at Dover.
For Harvick, his normal M.O. has been to run up front. He had 18 top-5s in 26 regular-season races. The 12th-place driver last year after Dover was Kasey Kahne, with 2,079 points. For Harvick to get to that point, he would need to average a ninth-place finish in the next two races.
While he has run well at New Hampshire and Dover recently, Harvick has only one Cup win at those two tracks — in September 2006 at New Hampshire.
As crew chief Rodney Childers is quick to point out, most of those races didn’t come in the car Harvick currently pilots. He was third at New Hampshire and second at Dover earlier this year. He has back-to-back third-place finishes at New Hampshire and has led 163 laps in the last two races.
“It’s going to be hard,” Childers said Sunday after Chicagoland. “We’ll have to see how it ends up. We’re going to try to win the next one, and then we’ll re-evaluate after that.”
If there’s anything Harvick and Childers learned on their way to the title last year, it was to put aside distractions — their team left many wins on the table during the regular season — and just concentrate on the present.
Childers seems relaxed. Active on social media, he didn’t hesitate with a little back-and-forth with reporters Saturday about the importance of having consistently fast laps in practice instead of just one fast lap.
Harvick posted the second-fastest lap in the final round of qualifying Friday to start on the front row Sunday.
“We just stay in there and grind away and don’t let circumstances really bother us, “Harvick said. “I think we go back and prepare and do things we have to do to prepare for each individual race track … with a fresh start on Monday.
“So these are all situations that we’ve been through before and our guys have done a great job in the past and we’ll just keep digging.”
Harvick’s competitors won’t count him out. They have seen him lead 1,460 laps this year – way more than Joey Logano, who is second in laps led with 863. Harvick also has 12 top-2 finishes with two wins and 10 runner-up results. The next driver on that list is Johnson, with seven top-2s (four wins and three seconds).
“You never know who can go on runs [in the Chase],” said Chicagoland winner Denny Hamlin. “You never know who can pick up the speed. We’ve seen it a million times. When the playoffs come around, somebody picks their game up from running 15th every week to running top five every week.
“I think it would certainly help our chances, for sure [if Harvick is eliminated]. But we’re confident that we can beat anybody, heads up, at Homestead if we have a chance.”
Chase drivers make up 13 of the first 15 starting positions on Sunday, including all of the top five with Carl Edwards on the pole followed by Harvick, Kurt Busch, Brad Keselowski and Johnson. Non-Chaser Kyle Larson starts sixth, followed by four more Chase drivers – Logano, Ryan Newman, Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr.
Harvick truly doesn’t have to worry about most of his Chase competition. He knows, and they know, he needs to very good, if not great.
“I wouldn’t consider them out at this point, by no means,” Logano said. “They’re still a very strong team and they’ll be up there racing hard and trying to get to the next round.
“But if we are able to knock them out and able to keep them from winning a race …”
Logano then caught himself thinking ahead and quickly shifted gears.
“We focus on our own thing,” Logano continued. “That’s the main thing … as long as we focus on what we need to do whatever happens throughout the rest of this Chase is what it is with everybody else.”
That would be Harvick’s philosophy as well. Those racing Harvick would do well to be aware of his sense of urgency.
“You still have to go out with the mentality of trying to win a race,” Harvick said. “I think everybody around us knows that. I think they are very aware of the aggressive nature that we need to go after that win.”
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