Tire issue derails champ's chances at win No. 3 of 2015
BROOKLYN, Mich. -- The road to the championship wasn’t exactly a smooth one for Kevin Harvick and his Stewart-Haas Racing team in 2014.
Early-season issues often stymied the team. Fast cars were sidelined by funky occurrences, broken parts, flat tires.
But Harvick and the team persevered. When the issues didn’t surface, there was no one better, no car faster.
The end result was the 2014 Sprint Cup Series championship, Harvick’s first and the second for SHR.
The momentum from last year’s title run hasn’t subsided. Heading into Sunday’s Quicken Loans 400 at Michigan International Speedway, Harvick already had two wins (at Las Vegas and Phoenix) and an incredible eight runner-up finishes.
No one else has been so close so often to the checkered flag, yet so far.
But on Sunday, the gremlins returned. Although he led a race-high 63 laps in a race shortened by rain to only 138 of its scheduled 200, a flat tire caused by an errant lug nut buried the No. 4 Chevrolet deep in the field.
Teammate Kurt Busch was out front when the skies opened up again, and took home the trophy.
Who knows? Had the race run its scheduled distance, with a couple of well-timed cautions it’s possible the team could have found itself back in the hunt. But it didn’t, the team didn’t and at the soggy end of a long day, the scoreboard in the infield showed the No. 4 29th in the final rundown.
Harvick’s fared worse this year -- he finished 38th at Bristol in April after being collected in a chain-reaction accident shortly after a restart. He led a race-best 184 laps at Bristol before the incident. It rained in that race as well.
“Once we were in front we were basically just cruising the entire day,” Childers said of Sunday’s effort. “We had a good car and the guys at the shop did a really good job. Really didn’t have any issues all weekend.
“It’s aggravating to give them away like that. I felt like we had the best car. When we pitted, there were some guys that stayed out … maybe it would have worked out for us but it’s hard to say.”
Harvick, who had qualified No. 2 on Friday, was out front at Lap 119 when he hit pit road under a round of green-flag pit stops. But after returning to the track, a flat right front tire caused when a lug nut knocked the valve stem off the wheel sent him back to the pits.
Childers said the team found the cause of the problem after going back and looking at video of the initial pit stop.
“One of the lug nuts that had come off the first wheel bounced off the changer’s leg and right when the other wheel was going in, (the lug nut) was in mid-air and he caught it (with the wheel),” he said.
“We’ve changed all kinds of stuff to keep it from happening and haven’t had it happen since Dover (last year). … I don’t even know how to fix it. Definitely got to do something though.”
After a week off, the Sprint Cup Series rolls back into action at Sonoma (Calif.) Raceway for the season’s first road-course stop on June 28.
Childers said his driver and team are more than up to the task.
“We’re just going there to win,” he said. “We had the best car there last year … so I feel good about it. We’ll do the best job we can and hopefully it’s good enough.
“Kevin and all the guys are on it. If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll be alright.”