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DARLINGTON, S.C. — Tossing his water bottle on the ground, Kevin Harvick walked away quickly from the garage following his runner-up finish in Sunday night’s Bojangles’ Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway. His frustration was evident: The No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing Chevrolet had paced the field for a race-high 214 of 367 laps only to be foiled by a series of slow stops that lost at least 17 spots all together on pit road.
With the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup beginning in two weeks, Harvick says something has to change.
“I’m over being a cheerleader,” he said after the race. “Those guys get paid a lot of money to perform on pit road. Cheerleading hasn’t been working so you have to get after them on pit road and do your job.”
The race’s seventh caution brought about the most damaging stop, when the Stewart-Haas driver — who led five times during the 367-lap event — entered pit road with the lead and left 12th due to a faulty air gun that thwarted the No. 4 team for the rest of the night. Despite the setbacks, Harvick put himself in contention for the win, battling with Martin Truex Jr. in the final laps — but missed the checkered flag by .607 seconds.
“It’s just the same old thing,” Harvick said. “You get in position where you bring a dominant car. The guys in the shop and the guys in the garage are doing a great job, and the guys on pit road are doing a terrible job. You get in a position to win races, and they continually step on their toes and don’t make it happen. You’re not going to win races like that.
“I’m really proud of the car that we brought tonight and the things that we’ve done on the race track, but you can only make so many excuses for pit road.”
For crew chief Rodney Childers, the near-win was a letdown to an evidently dominant car that he had spent hours laboring over Saturday night.
“We just had an OK car yesterday and we worked really hard last night to make sure we made the right changes going into the race and when I finally went to sleep at about 1 a.m., I knew we were going to be really good,” Childers told NASCAR.com. “I felt really good about it — I told Kevin this morning he was going to have a hot rod.
“So, we did all that stuff right and we just had a part failure inside one of our pit guns, very unusual thing — it wasn’t the changer’s fault … But definitely some things that we’ve got to clean up before (the Chase opener at) Chicago and honestly, that department’s got to do a lot better job.”
With ideal Sprint Cup pit stop times lying in the 12-seconds-or-less range, pit crew members literally have seconds to perfect each movement. It’s a synchronized dance that when one member trips, the entire routine falters.
Childers understands the mental toll that one bad stop can take on his crew for the remainder of the night. He even told his team via in-car radio in the midst of the race that they had to believe in themselves.
“It’s so easy to get off — they had great stops all night and we had one stop that was just a little bit off and when you have one that’s a little bit off it’s kind of like a mental breakdown,” Childers said. “The guys have to forget about that one and move on. They did a good job of that at Bristol and came back tonight with like a 10.8 (seconds) or something like that after our first bad stop. They were doing a good job until that gun broke.
“We’ve got to do a better job from week to week on pit road and hopefully they can get better.”