Find out why champ won career-high number of poles last season
Kevin Harvick, the newly installed NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion, is known as The Closer. He came by the nickname for his ability to close out races at the finish.
He wasn’t known as a great qualifier, however … until last season.
Harvick won eight Coors Light Pole Positions in his title season, two more than the total he’d earned over the previous 13 years of his career. The new format played a role, as did the ministrations and strategies of crew chief Rodney Childers, but Harvick gives credit where credit is due: Mobil 1 lubricants.
“I’ve had six (poles) in my whole career to this point, and we had eight this year,” Harvick said. “Between Rodney Childers and everyone at Stewart-Haas Racing and the effort they put into qualifying and the lubricants we have from Mobil 1 … really it is a lot about everyone’s contribution to the process and what we have under the hood. It all adds up to success.”
In his first season with the Mobil 1-backed SHR team, Harvick and Childers were fast off the truck all season long. He won the second race of the season at Phoenix International Raceway to punch his ticket to the Chase, and won the final two races of the season to clinch his first title.
From beginning to end, Harvick’s No. 4 Chevrolet SS was consistently fast. Mobil 1 was definitely a part of that, he said.
“Mobil 1 is unique because there’s a huge emphasis put on performance and development in the things that were used, like qualifying oils and lubricants,” Harvick stated. “It’s a constant push to make the lubricants better and make the cars as fast as they can. It comes with a speed advantage as well.
“Anytime you have a partner like Mobil 1 and you can have those technologies in your back pocket, it’s almost free speed. Any developments that come to us are obviously greeted with open arms. Mobil 1 is definitely in the secret sauce category, for sure. There are a lot of things that go into it, but they were definitely a big part of the puzzle.”
At Pocono, Harvick drove a Mobil 1 Chevrolet to victory, and that helped propel him to a title to cap Mobil’s 40th Anniversary season.
“Knowing the history Mobil 1 has in racing, and working at Stewart-Haas Racing, it was pretty cool to sport their logos at Pocono and even cooler to have a successful day there. Any time you can win your sponsor’s race, it’s a good thing, and we were fortunate enough to do that.”
As a further capper to an outstanding season, Harvick also won the season-long Mobil 1 Driver of the Race Award, given to the highest-finishing Mobil 1-equipped car in the race. That was worth $100,000 to the champ.
“Any time it’s one of your sponsors, it’s fun to have success and have the people who support you have success. For us to win the Mobil 1 Driver of the Race Award was pretty cool.”
Harvick is back to work after the blowout Championship Week celebration in Last Vegas surrounding his title, and he’s got a lot of things to sort out for 2015. One of them is the horsepower reduction that was announced late in the season. He’s not worried; just respectful of the challenge the new package presents.
“As you come into any NASCAR season, there’s going to be a lot of changes,” he said. “Last year we had the body changes, and now the package for this year. Horsepower is a big change. For me, it’s going to be similar to the XFINITY Series cars and the power they have there. It’s still a little bit more power than the XFINITY cars, but all in all there are a lot of changes you have to adapt to. We’ll see how it works out early in the season.”
Harvick had success in the XFINITY Series last year, and that gives him a little bit of an advantage.
“A Lot of it is going to relate to the XFINITY stuff, but even at the higher speeds in 2014, the cars had a similar style even at the higher rate of speed,” he said. “As you go into the new rules, they’re going to have a lot of same style. It’s kind of where the sport has migrated to over the past several years. I think the tires are going to have a huge impact in terms of what kind of tires they select. There’s going to be a lot of throttle time, even with less power and less downforce to go with it. It’s going to be a lot of the same style.”
Harvick came to SHR to win a title. He did, after 13 years with Richard Childress Racing. There were a few differences waiting when he got to SHR, and most of them concerned resources.
“When you look from a technical standpoint, we have a lot of resources at SHR. All the teams do. When you look at having a three-time champion (Tony Stewart) as your teammate and Kurt Busch, who has won a lot of races and a championship, and then you look at the
Hendrick side of it where those guys have won a ton of championships and a lot of races, I think you have a lot of things to look at and make yourself better. That meter of measuring yourself is at a pretty high level.”
Harvick, in a sense, won his first title by winning the second race of the season. It set him up in the Chase, allowed Childers to hone the setups and technical issues to a fine point and eventually win the winner-take-all finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
That sort of momentum is hard to stop, and Harvick is confident the same recipe can be used to bake up another title in 2015. He’ll have to do it without testing, but that’s OK.
“There’s always going to be unknowns, but I’m confident that my guys are going to come up with something that is pretty good,” he said. “Coming in last year, it took a lot of the teams a while to catch up to where we set the bar by getting off on the right foot. As we go into next year, we can maintain that same advantage. I’d rather not test anyway, so hopefully we can have it figured out and not test.”
If Harvick and Childers can cook up another title, you can bet that the secret ingredient will still be Mobil 1.
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