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KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Kevin Harvick said his team was fortunate to finish as well as it did Sunday, a 16th-place finish leaving the defending series champion fifth in points following the Hollywood Casino 400 at Kansas Speedway.
“We didn’t have a great weekend,” the 2015 Sprint Cup Series champion admitted after enduring a broken gear shift knob and a pit road penalty for removing equipment during the course of the 269-lap event.
“A lot of things falling off and now we’ve got to go to Talladega and have a good week.
“All in all it could have been a lot worse … everybody kept digging.”
Harvick, 39, led only once for 21 laps but ran inside the top five for much of the race.
It all went haywire for the Stewart-Haas Racing team, however, coming through a round of green-flag stops with some 50 laps remaining.
After hitting pit road for service, Harvick pulled out of his pit box on Lap 213 with the fuel can still attached to his car, resulting in a stop-and-go penalty that quickly dropped him to 20th and one lap down. Shortly afterward, he radioed his crew to announce that the knob on the gear shifter had broken.
“It was just really hard to shift from second to third just because there was nothing to grab onto for leverage,” he said. “But in the end the car vibrated all day; I’m lucky something else didn’t break.”
The top eight in points advance out of the Contender Round and into the Eliminator Round following next week’s CampingWorld.com 500 at Talladega Superspeedway (Sunday, 2:30 p.m. ET, NBCSN, MRN, SiriusXM). During the Challenger Round, Harvick kept his season alive in the opening round of the Chase, bouncing back from bad races at Chicagoland and New Hampshire to win comfortably at Dover.
Crew chief Rodney Childers says the team simply has to go to Talladega “and have a solid day.”
“It’s all about just racing,” he said. “Just like today. We go every week just to race; it’s not about anything other than that. Just do the best job you can and whatever happens, happens.”
The gear shifter problem and pit road violation were just a continuation of the team’s troubles at Kansas, according to Childers, who said the head of the shifter “looked like it wasn’t glued properly.”
“It started going south when we got here Friday,” Childers said of the team’s issues. “The brakes were dragging Friday. We finally got that fixed, qualified good and then (Saturday) didn’t go smooth.
“Then this morning the track bar slider locked up, we had to cut that off the car and replace it. Then the door seam broke(n) in half, the shifter broke and then we drove the gas can out.”
The broken door seam — a large crack ran down the driver’s side door area of the No. 4 Chevrolet — was a result of the beating the cars take from nothing more than air.
“A lot of these places that are real smooth … the air buffets a lot and it just beats them to death,” he said.
“I don’t think we necessarily had a bad weekend; a better weekend than most (teams). But our (fuel) mileage wasn’t very good and if we didn’t try to follow the car out of the box with the can we were going to run out anyway.”
Only one point separates Harvick, who was second in points entering Kansas, from eighth place Martin Truex Jr.
Outside the top eight heading to Talladega are Kyle Busch (ninth), Ryan Newman (10th), Dale Earnhardt Jr. (11th) and Matt Kenseth (12th).