RELATED: Full race results
HAMPTON, Ga. -- For the third consecutive season, and the fourth in the last five, Kevin Harvick had a dominant car at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
Also for the third consecutive season, the Stewart-Haas Racing driver did not come away with the victory at the 1.54-mile track.
Sunday's Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race was a series of long green-flag runs, interrupted on only three occasions late by the caution flag.
A slower-than-typical pit stop by Harvick's pit crew with less than 50 laps remaining and a late caution that put him on the outside for a green-white-checkered restart were hurdles he and the crew chief Rodney Childers-led team were unable to overcome.
Harvick led nine times for 131 laps. He finished sixth.
"We had issues about the last three runs," the 2014 Sprint Cup champion said. "I had to start driving the car different. It just required a little bit different handling.
"And then we had a slow pit stop there. We got way behind and the No. 48 (Jimmie Johnson) was way out front and I had to drive the car really hard and got the right rear burned up.
"We just didn't execute today but everybody … hung in there all day, and we'll keep at it."
Harvick and Martin Truex Jr. (Furniture Row Racing) had a spirited battle during the second half of the race, swapping the lead eight times during a stretch of nearly 100 laps.
But while they were racing, crew chief Chad Knaus was studying, and when he pulled six-time champion Jimmie Johnson to pit road for the final time earlier than most, the Hendrick Motorsports driver was suddenly a player.
Harvick pitted a few laps later, and his stop lasted a few seconds longer. Most felt that the fresher tires would enable him to eventually catch Johnson, but the gap between the two remained constant as the laps disappeared.
When the caution came out for the second time, setting up a two-lap dash, Harvick and a handful of others had one final shot. But Johnson was driving away when a second accident unfolded, effectively ended the event.
When starting on the outside, as his driver did, Childers said, "You don't have a chance. That's just part of it."
"It sucks to have that good of a car and not win, for sure. But I didn't feel like we could pit when the 48 pitted. I just didn't think our tires would last that long," he said.
"And then we had the mishap on pit road and lost a bunch of time. Then we were just too loose on that last run. It's one of those things -- you don't want to beat yourself but we definitely did it today."
Another 1.5-mile venue in Las Vegas -- the first of three races in the West Coast swing -- is up next, and Sunday's run offers promises of better days ahead for the No. 4 team, which won back-to-back at Las Vegas and Phoenix last season.
"I feel good about the speed we had all weekend," Childers said. "The car drove good; it was nice to get everybody in a rhythm, have our new engineer here, he had the flu the last two days … but it still worked out OK."