AVONDALE, Ariz. -- Over the past two weeks, Kevin Harvick has become adept at salvaging progress out of misfortune. At Texas, a late-race brush with the wall helped him gain a position in the final results. And Sunday on a dramatic afternoon at Phoenix International Raceway, a penalty for a dropped lug nut helped keep him alive in the championship hunt.

Harvick finished sixth on the desert oval, but how he got there was remarkable. The driver of the No. 29 car was fifth when a lug nut was left off his left-rear wheel during a pit stop, and the ensuing penalty knocked him back to 19th place and 130 points behind championship leader Denny Hamlin, who was dominating at the front of the field at that point.

But for the second consecutive week, an unforeseen pit stop benefited Harvick in the long run. The extra fuel Harvick took on the penalty stop gave him the gas it took to get to the finish, allowing him to shave a chunk off his championship deficit after Hamlin was forced to pit late. Harvick is now 46 off the lead heading into the season finale next weekend at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

"Well, our mistake wound up being something that gained us more points than if we would have not made the mistake," Harvick said. "We just kept after it and wound up getting an OK day. I didn't ever know that it would come down to the last race and I guess it's 46 points ... but that's what we race for. An hour ago I would have told you we were done. But now we stand here talking about gaining 11 or 13 [points] or whatever we gained today, and we'll go down there and still have a shot."

It was a situation somewhat similar to last week, when Harvick brushed the wall late in the race at Texas, but used the fresh rubber he picked up on an unscheduled pit stop to gain a position in the running order. Sunday at Phoenix, though, the circumstances were magnified by a championship race that seemed on the brink of being essentially decided a week early until the fuel-mileage scenario intervened. Harvick and Jimmie Johnson each made it to the finish, while Hamlin's late gas stop tossed the title back into uncertainty.

"Well, it didn't hurt," crew chief Gil Martin said of the lug nut error. "As it turned out, because it went green, it didn't kill us. We were able to keep running and it didn't kill us because we had gas to make it to the end. We had to check up and save there for just a little while just to make certain if there was a green-white-checkered that we had fuel, because we would have been dead in the water if a caution had come out with about six to go because one, we wouldn't have had tires like Denny and a couple one of them probably had to stop and get. And two, we probably wouldn't have had the fuel to run the green-white-checkered. So, it probably cost us four points for not passing [Johnson] there, but the 60 points we would have lost if we would have run out of gas, we wouldn't be in contention next week. You will still be able to talk about us next week. We're not out yet."

At the time, though, the pit-road error seemed devastating. Martin said one lug nut was knocked off the left-rear wheel, forcing Harvick to make another stop under NASCAR rules. "I wasn't really mad. I was just disappointed because I thought that it all had come out from underneath us," Harvick said. "But in the end, our mistake is the thing that gained us ground today."

It helped that car owner Richard Childress was on the radio urging his driver to keep after it, and that the No. 29 car was good enough to remain on the lead lap and pick off spots one by one. Martin let Harvick know that there was one advantage to their situation -- if the race stayed green, they could make it. Everybody else looked 10 to 12 laps short. The event concluded with a long green-flag run that allowed Harvick and Johnson to not only get back among the leaders, but remain in title contention.

"They were running too hard, they were going to burn their fuel down," Martin said of Hamlin's team. "Everybody was calling for debris, and we kept making sure we were on the radio saying there was no debris out there. Calling every corner, just trying to ensure him that we could make it if it went green. If it didn't, we were sitting there with 12-lap better left tires, so a two-tire change would have been good for us so we would have had an opportunity to get track position there. We were kind of in good shape for a very small window with around 12 to go to 15 to go, because if Denny had gotten a caution right then, we would have been in big trouble. That didn't happen. I can't believe we went that long here at the end at Phoenix, but we did."

And now, they're still in it -- even if they remain a long shot to bring RCR its first title in NASCAR's top division since Dale Earnhardt's last crown in 1994. "We dodged one for sure, and we still have a chance next week," Harvick said, "and that's all you can ask for."