Harvick still in ‘Chase’

By Reid Spencer

Last week, he and his crew salvaged a fourth-place finish.

For Kevin Harvick, the first lap of Sunday’s Sprint Cup race at Pocono Raceway wasn’t the unmitigated disaster it could have been — because the driver and crew of the No. 29 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet wouldn’t let it end that way.

The cars had barely gotten up to speed when Joe Nemechek spun Harvick in the tunnel turn. Harvick kept his car off the wall and escaped major damage.

Hard work by his crew, hard racing and spot-on pit strategy helped him climb to fourth position by the end of the race and kept him solidly in the mix for the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup.

If Harvick is still in the top 12 in the Cup championship standings after the Sept. 6 race at Richmond, he may well point to Pocono as the race that kept him there.

With a huge assist from the Childress fabrication shop, Harvick secured his fourth-place finish in a car that was wrecked in a tangle with Kurt Busch at Indianapolis a week earlier, leading to a 37th-place finish that dropped him temporarily out of the top 12.

Crew chief Todd Berrier’s call to bring his driver to the pits right before rain halted the Pocono race for 41 minutes, also helped turn circumstances to Harvick’s advantage.

“We had a good car,” Harvick said of the Pocono effort. “We just got mired in traffic there at the beginning of the race. And there at the end when it started raining, we pitted and we had good pit strategy. We were in our window right there where we only had to pit once at the end [for fuel] if it went green — and, man, it went green [for the final 55 laps]. “Just proud of Todd and all my Shell-Pennzoil Chevrolet guys for everything that they’ve done. It was the same car that we raced at Indy last week. They turned it around and fixed half the body and brought it [to Pocono].”

Though he’s 11th in points — eight ahead of RCR teammate Clint Bowyer in 12th and 19 ahead of 13th-place Matt Kenseth — Harvick has reason for optimism with five races left before the 12-driver Chase field is set.

Sunday’s race at Watkins Glen is made to order for Harvick, who has a win among four top-10 finishes in seven starts at the road course.

The final event in the so-called Race to the Chase comes at Richmond, where Harvick is even more proficient, having posted top 10s (including a win in 2006) in his last seven races there.

In other words, if Harvick needs a strong performance at the three-quarter-mile track to secure his place in the Chase, chances are he’ll get it.

“We don’t give up,” Harvick said. “I can promise you that. We stick in there and fight, even when they tell us we’re all done. To come to Pocono and finish in the top five is a huge accomplishment for me. At the beginning there, I was just up underneath somebody, and I think the 78 [Nemechek] just got in the back there and we all kind of got jammed up.

“I don’t know if it was anybody’s fault or not. But it worked out good. We were able to work on our car early and make it better, and we just kept making it better all day.”

Harvick is one driver who resolutely refuses to count points during NASCAR’s “regular season.” When he tells you he doesn’t pay attention to the standings, you tend to believe him.

But chances are, when Sept. 6 rolls around, he’ll be glad to have the points he earned with his never-quit attitude at Pocono.