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NASCAR Sprint Cup Series driver Kevin Harvick and his No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing team have become accustomed to overcoming long odds.
It is not a situation the group particularly enjoys.
Timely victories have kept Harvick in title contention ever since NASCAR officials re-vamped the series’ Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup format three years ago, adding an elimination element to the process.
In 2014, he faced a must-win situation at Phoenix International Raceway. He won, then went to Homestead the following week and beat Ryan Newman, Denny Hamlin and Joey Logano to capture his first Sprint Cup championship.
In 2015, he and his team needed a victory at Dover International Speedway, to advance out of the Round of 16. He won again. And once again made it all the way to the Championship 4, eventually finishing second to Kyle Busch.
Harvick didn’t need a win this past weekend at Dover – a victory the previous weekend at New Hampshire Motor Speedway had already guaranteed he and his team a berth in the Round of 12 – but when a broken track bar mount sidelined the black & white Chevrolet, the “what-ifs” came to mind.
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What if Harvick hadn’t won at New Hampshire? What if he had finished second? Had that been the case, based on the Dover results, it would have been Tony Stewart, the three-time series champion and co-owner of Harvick’s team, advancing and not Harvick.
“Good timing, that’s for sure,” Harvick said Tuesday during a round of media availabilities at NASCAR’s Charlotte headquarters.
“But I think that’s really how this whole deal has to go; no matter how fast your car is you still have to have things go your way as well.”
The ability to come through in the clutch says a lot about Harvick, 40, and the team led by crew chief Rodney Childers. It speaks to their ability to overcome adversity under pressure. It speaks to their individual talent, as well as the product they put on the race track.
“You’re only as good as the people you have around you,” Harvick said. “In my particular situation, you have a group of people that just take it to another level when we get into the Chase.”
RELATED: Harvick has been clutch in the Chase quite often
The preference, of course, would be for a team not to find itself in a must-win situation in the first place. But things happen. Parts break. Wrecks occur. That his team has managed to successfully navigate its way through the setbacks on so many occasions, Harvick said, has made the group stronger.
“We’ve definitely had our back against the wall more times than we probably should have,” he said, “but I think it’s also been great character builders for us … the past couple of years. It gives us a lot of experience in dealing with the pressures and things that come with the Chase. It’s a high pressure situation and you need to win races in order to keep moving on.”
And in today’s NASCAR, winning is everything. Win a race before the Chase, and you’re practically guaranteed a berth in the 16-team Chase field. Win a race in the Chase, and you move on to the next round.
Points play a pivotal role as well, but Harvick said he would rather control his own destiny than leave it up to the “points gods.”
Winning provides him that opportunity.
“There are just so many things on these cars that can go wrong,” he said. “You can get in an accident. You just never know.
“Everybody talks about Talladega but we could have a huge pileup on a restart like we did at Dover in the (spring) race. At Charlotte, Kansas, Martinsville, you could go anywhere and have that happen.
“You just have to look at it like any moment could be a bad moment and any moment could be a good moment. You need to capitalize on the good moments in order to control as many as you can.”
• The No. 4 team has seen no pit-road issues since making a change in its over-the-wall crew prior to this year’s Chase, and Harvick said Tuesday he has no regrets about voicing his concerns.
“This is a championship team,” he said. “We’ve won the championship. And it needs to be a championship team from the performance on the track, in the shop, on pit road and from the driver’s seat. That’s just the expectation that is out there. Those are the expectations that I have and those are the expectations I put on my guys and they put on each other.
“I believe there is some pretty thick skin on my team and they all know that we are there to be successful. It’s easier to talk about things when they aren’t going well than to let them progress. I have no problem being the bad guy; some people love me; some people hate me. It doesn’t bother me.”