...in an attempt to give Kevin the best shot at the title
Harvick, Bowyer switch pit crews for Martinsville
Bowyer: No question my team is the best at RCR, been together the longest
By Dave Rodman, NASCAR.COM
October 22, 2010
03:56 PM EDT
MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- History tells us the first five races in the Chase wouldn't statistically favor Kevin Harvick.
Thus, it's no surprise that Harvick, on the eve of Sunday's Tums Fast Relief 500 at Martinsville Speedway -- the sixth race of 10 in the Chase -- is pretty thrilled to be only 77 points behind leader and four-time defending Cup champion Jimmie Johnson and 36 behind second-place Denny Hamlin.
"If you look at average finishes and you look at the things that have happened in the past, we've been way above average over the first five races for us," Harvick said.
Despite Hamlin and Johnson combining to win the past eight races at Martinsville, Harvick is undeterred.
"It's a decent race track for us," Harvick said Friday. "Obviously those guys have got the results to back it up, but we've gone from the beginning of the Chase and overachieved on everything that we've done. This has just been a good year for us and we're not going to do anything different.
"If we hit a home run this weekend, we hit a home run. If we don't, there is no reason to worry about trying to force anything. And we just keep plugging away. I feel like we need to win a race in the next five to make it happen, but when you start forcing things to happen, you'll wind up with a 35th [place finish] and then you'll be done.
"To be in the game, you have to be close enough to be a part of the game. And we'll just keep racing."
Questions from the media Friday appeared to aggravate Harvick, who was asked if he had a goal of where he wanted to be coming out of Martinsville.
"I just told you what I wanted to do this weekend," Harvick said. "I want to do what we've been doing. I want to go out and race as fast as our car will go and race my own race."
And while Harvick will obviously concentrate on driving his own race car, when he hits pit road, there will be a big change. Team owner Richard Childress -- reacting to pit-road woes that have affected Harvick in both the Nationwide Series, where he works with his own Kevin Harvick Inc. crew as well as in Cup -- swapped Harvick's over-the-wall crew with teammate Clint Bowyer's.
"Those issues have been addressed and I believe everything will be fine this week," Harvick said. "Richard made some huge changes this week."
Bowyer, out of Chase contention in 12th, offered additional insight.
"There's no question that my team is arguably the best team at RCR -- they've been together the longest -- [and] with us being out of the championship deal, Kevin is the last shot at RCR at basically bringing a championship home," Bowyer said. "We owe it to everybody involved -- all the employees -- to try to bring that championship back home. Certainly I'm going to miss them, but I think we can win with [Harvick's] pit crew as well.
"There is certainly no slouch with what he had, and if he needed my crew to be better I was going to give it to him. I owe it to him as a teammate. We'll see [if it's a permanent switch]. Obviously if [Harvick] is out of the championship contention then I'll get them back, but as long as he's in that thing and he can win a championship for RCR, why not?" (Continued)
Bowyer, who won the opening Chase race but was knocked back by a 150-point penalty for an out-of-specification chassis, said he could only imagine his teammates' discomfort. He said that after he received a phone call telling him of the change, he went to the RCR shop on Tuesday to tell "his guys."
"The ones that it's hard for is the guys that have been with [Harvick] all year long and with five races to go you turn your back on them -- that's who it's hard for," Bowyer said. "It's difficult for those guys, but it is what it is. We're in this business to win championships and if he thought that he needed [the switch] to win a championship then we've got to give it to him.
"A championship is a huge thing and that's our only shot at doing so."
Martinsville's the latest hurdle for Harvick. Johnson boasts an average career Martinsville finish of 5.4 in 17 starts and Hamlin has a 6.6 career average here in 10 starts.
"I think [Martinsville] has a spoiler feel to it," Harvick said. "We'll spoil the one-two showdown this weekend, hopefully."
Harvick, in 18 career starts, lags back with an 18.1 average -- but it's not like he doesn't like the place. In Friday's opening Truck Series practice, Harvick was second in his own No. 2 Chevrolet to session leader Johnny Sauter and was in the top-five during Truck Happy Hour.
Harvick won his only Nationwide Series start on this paperclip-shaped half-mile oval in 2006 and he's won two of his past three Truck Series starts -- including last spring's.
Many insiders have said this is a three-man Chase -- despite the uncertainty of next weekend's wild 500-miler at Talladega Superspeedway. With five races remaining, and given his competitions' record here, Harvick knows he badly needs to keep pace Sunday.
"We'll just go out and do what we know how to do and start going forward over these last five weeks," Harvick said. "I think they're good race tracks for us. We've got through Charlotte and Dover without any major disasters, so I'm looking forward to the next five.
"The next five are particularly good race tracks for us as far as Homestead, Phoenix -- and even here. We've run well here. But you look at those statistics and they don't show that, so for us, it's 'do the same things that you do' and for us it's been on certain weekends doing that same thing."
Harvick led the standings at the end of the 26-race regular season by 228 points over Kyle Busch and has done relatively well in the five "pure" short-track races -- since NASCAR now considers everything under 1.5 miles a short track.
Harvick's short track average finish is 14.5, but that mark is ruined by his 35th-place finish here in the spring -- a race in which he led 57 laps and, he contended, "ran well" before he was derailed by a part failure. In the five Martinsville races before that, Harvick's average finish is 10th.
Harvick was just beyond the middle of the pack for most of Friday's lone Cup practice and he ended up 28th with a lap that was just .25 seconds behind session leader Tony Stewart.
The more troubling aspect might be that Harvick's average lap, 20.17 seconds over 34 laps, was only 32nd-best of the 48 cars that practiced. Juan Montoya had the best average, 19.77 seconds over 18 laps -- one of nine drivers who averaged in the 19-second range.
But that didn't dull his optimism.
"I think it just goes in streaks," Harvick said. "It's no different than any race track. You go through three or four or five years where you run good and for some guys it's probably like Charlotte is for us -- it's just a race track where you just can't get everything figured and so you just never have a good feel for what you need in the car.
"And that's probably one reason why [Martinsville] is so hard, is everybody did grow up on short tracks so the tolerance for being off is very small. And you wind up, when you're off -- you're off a small bit, but it's a lot here. When you wind up with the competition being that close, when you're off it's a mile, here -- a lot of spots. It's not just four or five spots, its 10 or 15 when you're off a 10th [of a second]."
Harvick, Bowyer switch pit crews for Martinsville
Bowyer: No question my team is the best at RCR, been together the longest
By Dave Rodman, NASCAR.COM
October 22, 2010
03:56 PM EDT
MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- History tells us the first five races in the Chase wouldn't statistically favor Kevin Harvick.
Thus, it's no surprise that Harvick, on the eve of Sunday's Tums Fast Relief 500 at Martinsville Speedway -- the sixth race of 10 in the Chase -- is pretty thrilled to be only 77 points behind leader and four-time defending Cup champion Jimmie Johnson and 36 behind second-place Denny Hamlin.
"If you look at average finishes and you look at the things that have happened in the past, we've been way above average over the first five races for us," Harvick said.
Despite Hamlin and Johnson combining to win the past eight races at Martinsville, Harvick is undeterred.
"It's a decent race track for us," Harvick said Friday. "Obviously those guys have got the results to back it up, but we've gone from the beginning of the Chase and overachieved on everything that we've done. This has just been a good year for us and we're not going to do anything different.
"If we hit a home run this weekend, we hit a home run. If we don't, there is no reason to worry about trying to force anything. And we just keep plugging away. I feel like we need to win a race in the next five to make it happen, but when you start forcing things to happen, you'll wind up with a 35th [place finish] and then you'll be done.
"To be in the game, you have to be close enough to be a part of the game. And we'll just keep racing."
Questions from the media Friday appeared to aggravate Harvick, who was asked if he had a goal of where he wanted to be coming out of Martinsville.
"I just told you what I wanted to do this weekend," Harvick said. "I want to do what we've been doing. I want to go out and race as fast as our car will go and race my own race."
And while Harvick will obviously concentrate on driving his own race car, when he hits pit road, there will be a big change. Team owner Richard Childress -- reacting to pit-road woes that have affected Harvick in both the Nationwide Series, where he works with his own Kevin Harvick Inc. crew as well as in Cup -- swapped Harvick's over-the-wall crew with teammate Clint Bowyer's.
"Those issues have been addressed and I believe everything will be fine this week," Harvick said. "Richard made some huge changes this week."
Bowyer, out of Chase contention in 12th, offered additional insight.
"There's no question that my team is arguably the best team at RCR -- they've been together the longest -- [and] with us being out of the championship deal, Kevin is the last shot at RCR at basically bringing a championship home," Bowyer said. "We owe it to everybody involved -- all the employees -- to try to bring that championship back home. Certainly I'm going to miss them, but I think we can win with [Harvick's] pit crew as well.
"There is certainly no slouch with what he had, and if he needed my crew to be better I was going to give it to him. I owe it to him as a teammate. We'll see [if it's a permanent switch]. Obviously if [Harvick] is out of the championship contention then I'll get them back, but as long as he's in that thing and he can win a championship for RCR, why not?" (Continued)
Bowyer, who won the opening Chase race but was knocked back by a 150-point penalty for an out-of-specification chassis, said he could only imagine his teammates' discomfort. He said that after he received a phone call telling him of the change, he went to the RCR shop on Tuesday to tell "his guys."
"The ones that it's hard for is the guys that have been with [Harvick] all year long and with five races to go you turn your back on them -- that's who it's hard for," Bowyer said. "It's difficult for those guys, but it is what it is. We're in this business to win championships and if he thought that he needed [the switch] to win a championship then we've got to give it to him.
"A championship is a huge thing and that's our only shot at doing so."
Martinsville's the latest hurdle for Harvick. Johnson boasts an average career Martinsville finish of 5.4 in 17 starts and Hamlin has a 6.6 career average here in 10 starts.
"I think [Martinsville] has a spoiler feel to it," Harvick said. "We'll spoil the one-two showdown this weekend, hopefully."
Harvick, in 18 career starts, lags back with an 18.1 average -- but it's not like he doesn't like the place. In Friday's opening Truck Series practice, Harvick was second in his own No. 2 Chevrolet to session leader Johnny Sauter and was in the top-five during Truck Happy Hour.
Harvick won his only Nationwide Series start on this paperclip-shaped half-mile oval in 2006 and he's won two of his past three Truck Series starts -- including last spring's.
Many insiders have said this is a three-man Chase -- despite the uncertainty of next weekend's wild 500-miler at Talladega Superspeedway. With five races remaining, and given his competitions' record here, Harvick knows he badly needs to keep pace Sunday.
"We'll just go out and do what we know how to do and start going forward over these last five weeks," Harvick said. "I think they're good race tracks for us. We've got through Charlotte and Dover without any major disasters, so I'm looking forward to the next five.
"The next five are particularly good race tracks for us as far as Homestead, Phoenix -- and even here. We've run well here. But you look at those statistics and they don't show that, so for us, it's 'do the same things that you do' and for us it's been on certain weekends doing that same thing."
Harvick led the standings at the end of the 26-race regular season by 228 points over Kyle Busch and has done relatively well in the five "pure" short-track races -- since NASCAR now considers everything under 1.5 miles a short track.
Harvick's short track average finish is 14.5, but that mark is ruined by his 35th-place finish here in the spring -- a race in which he led 57 laps and, he contended, "ran well" before he was derailed by a part failure. In the five Martinsville races before that, Harvick's average finish is 10th.
Harvick was just beyond the middle of the pack for most of Friday's lone Cup practice and he ended up 28th with a lap that was just .25 seconds behind session leader Tony Stewart.
The more troubling aspect might be that Harvick's average lap, 20.17 seconds over 34 laps, was only 32nd-best of the 48 cars that practiced. Juan Montoya had the best average, 19.77 seconds over 18 laps -- one of nine drivers who averaged in the 19-second range.
But that didn't dull his optimism.
"I think it just goes in streaks," Harvick said. "It's no different than any race track. You go through three or four or five years where you run good and for some guys it's probably like Charlotte is for us -- it's just a race track where you just can't get everything figured and so you just never have a good feel for what you need in the car.
"And that's probably one reason why [Martinsville] is so hard, is everybody did grow up on short tracks so the tolerance for being off is very small. And you wind up, when you're off -- you're off a small bit, but it's a lot here. When you wind up with the competition being that close, when you're off it's a mile, here -- a lot of spots. It's not just four or five spots, its 10 or 15 when you're off a 10th [of a second]."
