"Happy" Harvick, the current championship leader, couldn’t be happier and his crew chief Rodney Childers was all smiles Sunday afternoon too as was one of his team owners, Gene Haas.
For his other team owner, Tony Stewart, it’s a mixed bag of emotions.
While Harvick has given the Stewart-Haas Racing team plenty to celebrate both last year and already with this strong 2015 season start, the rest of his team — including Stewart — are playing major catch-up, much like the rest of the series.
As good as Harvick’s No. 4 Budweiser Chevrolet has been, the other SHR cars have struggled mightily in the results department even, when they’ve shown speed in practice or qualifying. Harvick has two runner-ups and a win — the three other SHR drivers don’t have a top-10 among them.
Three-time Cup champion Stewart finished 33rd on Sunday and hasn’t finished better than 30th in three races this year. He’s ranked 34th in the points standings, two points behind Brian Vickers, whose 15th-place effort Sunday was his only start this year.
SHR driver Danica Patrick is 20th in the championship standings. It’s better than the 33rd-place points position she occupied three races into the 2014 season, but she has only one finish better than 20th (16th at Atlanta).
Regan Smith, who has been driving the team’s No. 41 Chevy while SHR driver Kurt Busch serves a NASCAR suspension for off-track legal issues, has put in the most consistent showings of the three non-Harvick driven cars with finishes of 16th (Daytona), 17th (Atlanta) and 16th (Las Vegas). And Smith, a XFINITY Series champion contender, had only seven Cup starts since 2013.
"When they do win and make it look easy, you kind of scratch your head, well, ‘How can they do that?’ " Haas said of Harvick after the race.
And the answer is pretty straight forward if challenging to achieve.
Both Harvick and Childers readily admit they have hit on a combination of technical know-how, performance talent and team chemistry that has separated them from the field right now.
SHR has been proactive in trying to find that for its other three programs, too.
Teammates Busch and Patrick exchanged crew chiefs and Stewart and Harvick swapped pit crews for 2015 looking for the right recipe to re-boot their programs.
Stewart, for example, has had only one top-10 (fourth at Martinsville, Virgina) since July of last year. Patrick’s last top-10 was a sixth-place at Atlanta last September. Busch looked to be headed in the right direction with five finishes of 11th or better in the last six races of 2014, only to be sidelined so far this year.
"We want all four team to finish one, two, three, four," Childers said. "That’s the goal of the company. I think we’ve been fortunate as a team. We found some stuff that worked for us and worked for Kevin at the beginning of the year last year, and we’ve just been able to carry that through.
"Hopefully, we can get all that stuff going better for the other guys and get all four up there in the top-five."
To be fair, the entire SHR organization has been through extremely difficult times in the past two years. Stewart severely injured his leg competing in a sprint car race in August of 2013 and missed the rest of the Cup calendar. Last year he was involved in a fatal accident racing sprint cars and opted to sit out three races.
Busch has yet to make a start for the team this year while serving a NASCAR suspension stemming from off-track legal issues.
"Quite frankly, we’ve had a lot of turmoil over the last year and we just kind of keep going," Haas said. "I think it’s just the nature of Tony and myself, and how we deal with things.
"Dealing with those kind of things is just part of what it takes to be in this business. Racing is an interesting business because you never know what’s going to happen. You never know if you’re going to win until the race is over and I guess running a race shop is very similar to that. It’s a challenge and when things are thrown at us we just basically deal with it and try not to complain about it and do your best to get out of it."
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