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KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Forget El Toro. The Closer? That’s so yesterday.
More like Houdini.
Kevin Harvick, the master escape artist.
Back to the wall? No way out? Done?
To quote John “Bluto” Blutarsky, “Nothing is over until we decide it is!”
Harvick and his No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing team pulled another rabbit out of the hat here Sunday, winning the Hollywood Casino 400 at Kansas Speedway and earning an automatic berth into NASCAR’s Round of 8. Championship dreams haven’t been extinguished.
He and Jimmie Johnson, last week’s winner at Charlotte, will sleep soundly. There will be no Talladega nightmares in the coming week.
The 2014 champions have made a habit of survival in NASCAR’s Chase elimination format since its debut two years ago.
In ’15, it was a must-win situation at Dover; Harvick went out and dominated to stay alive. In ’14, same scenario, different round; he won at Phoenix to stave off elimination and move into the Championship Round, then went to Homestead to win the race and the title.
This year has been no different.
A 20th-place finish in the first round at Chicago dropped the team outside the top 12 in the 16-team field; Harvick won the next week at New Hampshire.
A 38th-place result last week at Charlotte — in the opening race of the second round — dropped him to 12th, with anything-can-happen Talladega ahead and only the top eight moving on.
He won at Kansas.
If some teams wilt under pressure, this one seems to step up. Challenges surface, but they’re met and overcome.
Harvick led 74 laps of the 267-lap race Sunday, including the final 30.
“If you can’t win, you won’t win one of these championships,” Harvick, now a four-time winner this season, said afterward. “You’ll get to Homestead and you may point (race) your way in, but there will be a car that shows up there that’s going to win the race and win the championship.”
Points and points racing hold no interest for Harvick, thanks to Rodney Childers, the man who oversees everything concerning the No. 4 team and how it operates.
“He didn’t want to hear anything about points before we started this deal,” Harvick said of his crew chief. “I’m like, ‘OK, well, that’s a new approach for me.’ Usually you go home, you look at the points standings, that was a pretty good week.”
Now?
“If we don’t win, it’s not a good week,” Harvick said.
Harvick credits Childers, Childers returns the favor, saying it’s his driver’s confidence and drive that “feeds down through him” to the team.
“We’re just fortunate to have a lot of guys that won’t quit,” Childers explained. “They don’t take no for an answer. They don’t care how many hours they work. They don’t care what they have to do. They just try to make it happen.
“It’s cool to be in that environment and be around people like that. It’s something that we all hope that we can do sometime in our lifetime.”
Maybe there were better cars Sunday, maybe there were faster cars. But NASCAR is often a game of opportunity; Harvick and his crew seized this one.
“Do I feel like we had the best car today? Probably not,” Harvick said. “Did we have the best car at (New Hampshire)? Probably not. But guess what, we kept ourselves in it all day. … It’s good to feel like you probably didn’t have the fastest car and win the race because I felt like, we felt like, a lot of times we’ve had the fastest car and didn’t win the race. So it’s good to get a few of those back.”
The team’s ability to step up isn’t lost on the competition. Others have been there to see it play out all too often.
“When it comes to these situations, they usually find a little more speed somewhere in their cars,” said third-place finisher Joey Logano (Team Penske). “I don’t know how, but when they are in must-win situations, they find more speed, which is always interesting to me that they have a little left in the tank.”
Said runner-up Carl Edwards (Joe Gibbs Racing): “I don’t think they had the fastest car (but) they made it happen. So congrats to them.”
Only Austin Dillon (Richard Childress Racing), a solid sixth in the final rundown, seemed to have an idea of how to curtail Harvick’s comeback combativeness, suggesting others “get together and block … in elimination races or just pull for something because he’s tough to beat in those final races.
“There’s no doubt about it, he steps up when the pressure’s there,” Dillon said. “That team does a good job.”
No matter the situation, the team knows it can perform. It has proven it time and time again. So much so, Harvick said, that it’s “not something we really even talk about because we’ve already done all that.”
Add Sunday’s victory to the list. It may not have been magic, but it was magical just the same.
