For five races in 2018, Kevin Harvick and the No. 4 team’s race day has ended with hat dances and Busch Beer, the team plane carrying five winner’s trophies (plus one $1 million check) back to the Stewart-Haas Racing shop.
Once that plane lands back in North Carolina, however, it’s time to toss the beer – and pick up a wrench.
“As hard as it is to do, when you get off the plane Sunday night, you’ve got to be over what happened on the weekend, whether you’ve won or lost and I believe that’s the key to pushing yourself forward and pushing your team forward to make sure that the goal is to always get better,” Kevin Harvick told NASCAR.com on a recent visit to the Mobil 1 research and engineering facility. “If you’re coming home and going to dwell on the fact that you won the race over the weekend or you lost the race over the weekend, you’re not accomplishing anything in preparation for the next week.
“Monday is all about preparation for the next week and nothing to do with last week.”
Winning has become the standard for Stewart-Haas Racing in 2018. As a group, the team has won exactly half of the first 12 points races of 2018, with Harvick & Co. earning five and Clint Bowyer’s No. 14 team breaking through for a Martinsville victory in March. All four drivers rank in the top 10 in points.
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But what exactly has caused this improvement in performance as a group?
The answers vary: No. 10 crew chief Johnny Klausmeier said the team has worked out some of its “growing pains” from 2017, its first season with Ford. Kurt Busch referenced the team’s newfound “synergy” and the notion that each driver is “pushing each other” harder. No. 4 crew chief Rodney Childers pointed out everyone is “working together” and “communicating.”
SHR Competition Director Greg Zipadelli said the team spent the winter “really looking at the details.”
“Last year, we did everything we could to just make it to the race track, to prepare cars. This winter, we made a lot of changes in-house and how we do things and I think we’re kind of seeing the benefits of it …,” he said. “A lot of the things that we did with the Chevrolets didn’t work with the Fords; these noses are so different, airflow and a lot of those types of things. So we had to stop, kind of relook at things … So, from all our engineers on a weekly basis to people in the aero group to everybody in our engineering group has been able to give their input, refine things at every level.”
They just seem to have all the pieces of the puzzle now, Harvick summarized.
“When you add all those pieces to the puzzle up and you look the experience of the team, you look at the partnerships that we have with Ford and Mobil 1 and all the support that we have from our ownership group to let us go out and explore and do the things and take the chance of switching to a different manufacturer … and controlling more of our own parts and pieces and things,” he said. “Those things all added up and in my opinion, the light at the tunnel is very bright still because I feel like we have a long ways to go to achieve and really get a full understanding and the most out of all the resources and things that we have. I feel like we can get a lot more out of them.”
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One of those resources is SHR partner Mobil 1, whose impact was witnessed firsthand when Harvick, Busch, Aric Almirola and their respective crew chiefs flew to Paulsboro, New Jersey, to tour its research and engineering facility on May 15. Donning lab coats and safety glasses, the drivers and crew chiefs peered into Mobil 1’s laboratories and went behind the scenes with chemists to learn what goes into their race cars each week.
The team’s newest driver, Almirola seemed particularly fascinated in his first trip to the state-of-the-art facility, asking several questions during the tour.
“We … had our minds blown,” he said afterward. “It’s just an information overload. To see how much detail, all the way down to microscopic detail, is amazing and to know that they put a lot of that technology and resources and development into our race engines before it ever sees a passenger car. And that’s really neat to be able to be the proving grounds because we operate under such extreme conditions and require and demand so much out of the engine oil.”
MORE: Behind-the-scenes photos from the tour
Kevin Harvick recalled his first year at Stewart-Haas and how he was impressed during qualifying that they’d pick up a “tenth-and-a-half or two-tenths of a second and it literally came down to the oil in the engine.” From his crew chief’s perspective, every little bit makes a big difference.
“Any advantage you can get right now is an advantage in the Cup Series,” Childers said. “You just have everybody so close together, their lap times are so close together, so you have a lot different products where you can go about getting more speed, whether it’s engine oil or greases in the rear housing or the hubs. All that stuff makes a huge difference. So, (Mobil 1 is) constantly working on that stuff to make it better and get a little bit more advantage on people.”
Competitive advantage, through all the team’s facets, is what a race team strives for each week. The No. 4 team in particular has been in a different league than many of the competitors at the race track this year; Harvick is the first driver since Jeff Gordon in 1997 to win five of the first 12 races. While Harvick doesn’t liken himself to the newly tapped Hall of Famer, he does see the parallels with his group and the Rainbow Warriors.
“You have such a cohesiveness in the team that everybody believes in each other and an organization that believes in what they’re doing and what they can accomplish,” he said. “I look at what Tony Stewart did when he won the championship back in 2011. What that organization did is what it does every day now. I think one of the things that’s changed the most is as a company we can race at a championship-weekend level on a weekly basis now. And that’s really a lot of fun to be a part of.”
Childers smiled when asked about the atmosphere back at the race shop, calling it “crazy good.”
“Winning is addicting and you just want to keep doing it more and more,” he said. “It makes everybody work harder every week. You want to just continue that and see how many races you can win. It’s just something that we may never get to do again in our careers, so we’re trying to work really hard to keep all that going.”
Being a part of a winning group is exciting; the No. 4 team has its sights set on more Victory Lane trophies and eventually, its second championship at Homestead-Miami Speedway. But after the confetti’s cleared, the celebration has simmered down and the lights go out at the race track, what’s left to keep them inspired isn’t so flashy: It’s the people at the shop who work hard together every week to keep the team going — no matter the race outcome.
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“You’re going to have good weekends and you’re going to have bad weekends and right now it seems to be going good,” Childers said. “So, the next time we have a really bad one, it’s probably not going to be good. It’s just hard — you get used to winning, just like in any sport you want to continue that. The more you strive for that, the more disappointed you are when you do have a bad day.
“We’ve got a good group of people, we have each other’s backs and I think that that group of people is what keeps us all grounded and motivated at the same time.”