With Harvick, only thing obvious is his frustration

INDIANAPOLIS -- Kevin Harvick walked out of his garage stall at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, sat down on a stack of tires, and proceeded to field a flurry of questions from reporters wondering if he wants to leave Richard Childress Racing after this year. Through it all, he wore an expressionless mask worthy of a championship poker player going all in on a bluff.

Not so Happy

Kevin Harvick doesn't seem very happy these days at Richard Childress Racing. What are the odds he's able to get out of his contract one year early? The writers debate.

• More

"Right now, we're focused on this week," he said Saturday, after qualifying 19th for the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard. "We have a good car this weekend, and our focus is on this particular race."

Questions about Harvick's future have persisted since last week, when reports surfaced that the flagship driver at RCR wanted out of his contract a year early so he could go race somewhere else. Team owner Richard Childress issued a statement saying that Harvick would remain in the fold at least though the end of his current deal, which runs through 2010. And yet, the 2007 Daytona 500 winner has offered no public hints about what he really wants to do.

Has he asked out of his contract? "We're focused on this weekend," he said.

And yet, his frustration with what he's called the worst season of his racing career is clearly evident. A championship contender for most of his tenure at NASCAR's premier level, Harvick came to Indianapolis a distant 25th in points and with no real shot at the year-end championship Chase. It's been 90 races since his last victory, that knife's-edge triumph over Mark Martin at Daytona now more than two and a half years ago. His struggles are reflected throughout RCR, which after two years of placing three drivers in the Chase is on the verge of being locked out.

For the No. 29 team, it's been problem after problem after problem. A change of crew chief earlier in the year seemed to have little effect. "I don't think moving from one crew chief to another necessarily did anything but make people realize that the problem was somewhere else other than our crew chiefs," Harvick said. There are have been accidents and parts failures too many to count, only adding to the frustration of a driver who hasn't cracked the top 10 since Atlanta in March.

His chances at Indy, where he won in 2003? He's hopeful, but realistic.

"I wouldn't put it past us to run in the top five and be right there this weekend," he said. "At Chicago, we had a top-10 car and the bottom of the power steering reservoir fell out. Just stupid stuff like that's happened. I've hit the tires 100 times at [Infineon Raceway] in Turn 11, and this time it rips the whole right-front suspension off. It's just been one thing after another. In New Hampshire, we were in the middle of the melee up there. It's just, on top of the cars not running well, you've been in the middle of all these crazy scenarios and crashes and things that have happened, and it just piles on because the results don't show up on the results sheet on Monday morning. The next thing you know, everybody's like, what in the world is happening?"

The roller-coaster fortunes of RCR have obviously taken a toll on Harvick, who said his organization needs consistency more than anything else. The team struggled in the aftermath of Dale Earnhardt's death in 2001, rebuilt and struggled again in 2005, rebuilt and is struggling again this season. "These up-and-down spurts," he said, "aren't what's going to win championships." Harvick's situation only adds to what teammate Jeff Burton calls "a little bit of chaos" going on at RCR right now.

"We haven't had the results that we need to have. Whenever you're not having results, the pressure gets turned up. That's the way it is right now," Burton said. "There's a huge effort to go and do things differently and change things, and through that there creates a great deal of problems. People are working more hours than they've ever worked. We're asking a whole lot more out of everybody. It's not going to turn around overnight, so you've get a deal where everybody is working harder but the results aren't changing quickly. It's hard. When you get behind, everything gets harder."

Coming off an off week, Burton said he wasn't up to speed on the news reports involving Harvick. But: "I know this about Kevin -- Kevin wants to be part of an organization that's competitive," he said. "Richard wants to have an organization that's competitive. Harvick is wanting to go win championships and races, and so is Richard. Ultimately, they've both been really good for each other. There have been a lot of race wins there with that combination, and I think neither one of them thinks it's good enough, and they're both pushing hard. I hate we're in this situation where we even have to talk about it, but at the end of the day we're all working hard."

Will that be enough to keep Harvick? There were no such indications Saturday. Harvick said he's not going to "drag this thing through the mud," meaning he's not going to debate it in the media. The only definite, he said, is that he has no interest in starting a Sprint Cup program for himself at Kevin Harvick Inc., the team he owns that fields entries on the Nationwide and Camping World Truck series.

"There's really nothing being looked at," he said. "Everybody's kind of stale right now, and everything is just not fast enough, and everything just isn't running well enough to be where everybody wants to be. So I don't really have anything to look at, or look forward to, or have anything cooking, or anything different, or anything like that. Right now, I'm the driver of the Shell-Pennzoil RCR Chevrolet, and that's what I intend to continue to focus on."