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DOVER, Del. — The second-guessing began after Chicago and escalated a week later following New Hampshire.
Back-to-back finishes outside the top 20 have put defending NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion Kevin Harvick in a must-win situation heading into Sunday’s AAA 400 at Dover International Speedway (2:30 p.m. ET, NBCSN, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
“Everybody’s an armchair quarterback on Monday morning,” Rodney Childers, crew chief for Harvick and the Stewart-Haas Racing No. 4 team, said Saturday prior to the start of practice at Dover. “I think you’re always going to have that.”
Contact with fellow driver Jimmie Johnson led to the blown tire at Chicagoland in the opening race of this year’s Chase for the Sprint Cup; last weekend at Dover, Harvick had a dominant car and led for a total of 216 laps, but ran out of fuel while leading just three laps from the finish.
As a result, Harvick finds himself 15th among the 16 Chase drivers; only the top 12 remain in title contention following this weekend’s Challenger Round cutoff race.
Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Denny Hamlin and Matt Kenseth took the first two Chase races to guarantee they will be around for the Contender Round, which begins next weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
“The deal at Chicago, it smoked that first corner and the next lap it didn’t smoke at all,” Childers said. “We had the rear bumper camera on our pit box; if there is anything coming out of the back of the car you can see it on that rear bumper camera. The second lap it didn’t smoke at all. Timmy (Fedewa) on the spotters’ stand said it didn’t smoke. I think really … (Kevin) ran the car easier that lap and we didn’t really know that. The next lap, when we told him it wasn’t smoking anymore, he ran it hard through (Turns) 1 and 2 and it smoked again and then blew the tire out.”
Running out of fuel at Loudon, he said, was tougher to swallow.
“There shouldn’t have been any issues,” he said. “But there were a few things during the pit stop that looked like the pit crew could have done differently to try and do more to get it full and it wasn’t.
“Most of the time you know. But to be honest, he never really ran hard all day so we didn’t have good readings on what it should be. Even that last run, our mileage was the best it had been all day. Everybody thought Matt (Kenseth) was pushing us but he really wasn’t, we were never really running hard the whole time he was behind us. It’s not too often you have a car like that. It was just so fast that he could do whatever he wanted.”
Harvick was fourth fastest in the opening, abbreviated practice Saturday at Dover. Rain had canceled all on-track activity on Friday.
Technically, Harvick can advance based on points, but the scenarios that would allow that to occur are a mathematician’s nightmare. “Really, those guys (ahead of us) would have to crash out early in the race,” Childers said.
Win the race and the rest will take care of itself.
Harvick has two wins, at Las Vegas and Phoenix earlier in the year, and 10 runner-up finishes. He’s never won at Dover, a high-banked 1-mile track.
“We try every week to win; if you don’t, that’s pretty much it,” Childers said. “You just hate that it comes down to that, to lead the points all year, have the consistency that we’ve had, just hate to see that it’s come down to this.
“But on the other hand I feel like we’ve got the team to do it and the driver to do it.
“I think if you’re going to back any team against the wall, this is the one to do it.”