Editor's note: The views expressed in this column are solely those of the author.
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DOVER, Del. -- How strong was Kevin Harvick and the Stewart-Haas Racing team in Sunday’s AAA 400 at Dover International Speedway?
"If we would have had qualifying on Friday," crew chief Rodney Childers said Sunday evening, "we'd have led 400 (laps)."
Folks laughed and Childers smiled. But beneath the euphoria of another victory, Childers wasn't kidding.
Harvick, the defending NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion, didn't lead every lap in the series' 29th race. He led 355. The dominating performance came one week after the No. 4 Chevrolet was out front for 216 of 300 laps at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
A miscalculation cost Harvick that particular victory -- his fuel cell ran dry just three laps from the finish to drop him from first to 21st. Combined with a crash at Chicagoland Speedway the previous week, Harvick arrived in Dover with seemingly little chance of advancing out of the Challenger Round of this year's Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup.
Fifteenth in a field of 16 that would see four drivers eliminated from Chase contention, Harvick didn't accomplish the impossible at Dover. The improbable? Yes. The impossible? No.
We've seen this movie before. Faced with elimination last year, Harvick thrashed the field at Phoenix and then went on a week later to win the race and the championship at Homestead.
Pressure rolls off the 39-year-old like rain off a freshly waxed car. Being put in a must-win situation isn’t pressure in Harvick's world. It's opportunity.
Pressure is being thrust into the spotlight following the loss of one of the sport's legendary figures.
"That was pretty high," Harvick said of the call-up to fill the ride formerly held by seven-time series champion Dale Earnhardt in 2001. "There will never be anything close to that one.
"When you look at the sport's biggest hero gone, you look at millions of race fans that are depending upon somebody to drive that car and you have 350 people that have jobs and families and you're their guy, never done it before, but good luck. You know what I mean? That's a lot of pressure."
Before Sunday, Harvick had never won at Dover. Cross the 1-mile concrete track off the list. Only Sonoma, Texas, Pocono and Kentucky remain to be conquered.
In a span of barely three-and-a-half hours Sunday, Harvick and his team went from the best team not expected to advance to the team to beat from here on out.
Runner-up Kyle Busch, extending his own amazing season by racing his way into the next round from outside the top 12, said as much.
"That was a guy," Busch admitted, "that we wanted to knock out ... that's a guy that can win all these races and you don't want to have to compete against a guy like that."
Harvick has finished second 10 times this year, and to come so close without closing the deal can be disheartening. It can also build character.
"If you're going to get frustrated over running like we've run this year, you're probably going to be a detriment to your team," Harvick said.
Win or lose, he said, you show up at the start of a new workweek and begin anew.
"It's just the nature of this team and what they do, and the character of it is deep, and they all believe in each other," he said. "When you have a group of people like this that doesn't do things out of the ordinary for situations like this, you know, they just look at it as another task at hand."
He has led more than 2,000 laps for the second consecutive season, a mark as impressive as this year's 19 top-five and 23 top-10 finishes.
It was a demoralizing defeat for those who thought they had the defending champion on the ropes. But there are more opportunities ahead for Busch and others in the Chase field.
"We'll see what happens," the Joe Gibbs Racing driver said. "There are still two more rounds to figure out who's going to make it to Homestead."
In the meantime, Harvick and his group aren't making any apologies for Sunday's runaway.
"“We're not going to ride around fifth all day and wait to take the lead at the end," Childers said. "That's not what we're made out of.
"We came here to lead laps and to do our job and to end up with that car in Victory Lane."
And at the end of the day, that's exactly what they accomplished.