CUP: Happy Hour For Harvick?

Sprint Cup

CUP: Happy Hour For Harvick?

Kevin Harvick is third in the NASCAR Sprint Cup standings...

Tom Jensen | Posted October 20, 2010 Charlotte, NC

Kevin Harvick has three wins this season. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

For Kevin Harvick, the time is now.

Sunday’s Tums Fast Relief 500 at Martinsville Speedway is arguably the most critical race in Harvick’s NASCAR Sprint Cup career, at least in the context of racing for a championship.

Harvick was fantastic in NASCAR’s regular season, easily amassing the most points of anyone in the first 26 races of the season. During the opening five races of the Chase for the Sprint Cup, Harvick has been good but not great, with an average finish of 7.6, including an eighth-place run last Saturday night at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Right now, Harvick is third in points, trailing Jimmie Johnson by 77 points and second-place Denny Hamlin by 36. And while his Richard Childress Racing squad overall has had a huge and positive reversal of fortune from its dismal 2009 season, realistically Harvick is the only RCR driver still in the title hunt.

With teammates Jeff Burton and Clint Bowyer 10th and 12th, respectively, in points, Harvick is carrying with him not only the fortunes of his No. 29 Shell-Pennzoil team, but of the entire RCR squad.

This weekend at Martinsville is fraught with potential peril for Harvick: His average finish at the paper-clip-shaped 0.526-mile oval is 18.111, vs. 5.353 for Johnson, 6.600 for Hamlin and 6.686 for fourth-place Jeff Gordon. In 18 career Cup starts at Martinsville, Harvick has never finished higher than seventh. That means his best finish here is worse than the average finishes of each of the three guys he’s racing for the title. That does not bode well for Harvick’s fortunes this weekend.

In the spring race at Martinsville, Harvick finished 35th, losing 132 points to race-winner Hamlin and 75 to ninth-place finisher Johnson. If Harvick gives up anywhere near that many points to either of his rivals this week, his championship hopes are virtually over.

Jimmie Johnson (Left) talks with Kevin Harvick (Right) at Atlanta in March 2009. Both are chasing the NASCAR Sprint Cup title. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Harvick is cautiously optimistic about his chances at Martinsville.

“I think we've run well there,” he said. “We ran well at the first race and had some mechanical issues. We just have to keep doing what we've been doing. I think Burton had the fastest car there last time and wound up getting a flat tire, so we will look at those notes and go from there and see what happens.”

What Harvick is really hoping for is to not lose much ground at Martinsville this weekend and then head to Talladega Superspeedway, where he won in the spring, and make a points surge there.

“I'll take the odds,” Harvick said. “If it all ended at Talladega and we were behind, I'll take the odds. We've been really good on those race tracks this year. I feel like we've had good strategies and done the things that we have needed to do and had fast cars. So really in the end, fast cars is what it takes to even have shot at winning a race. You have to have a car that is capable of doing that. I like the plate races. I enjoy them.”

And so the plan is survive this week, attack next week.

“We'll go there (Talladega) and race just like we have and all the rest of them this year and hopefully come out with similar outcome,” said Harvick.

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100 and e-mail him at Jensen is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of Speed,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association and an NMPA Writer of the Year.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom Jensen

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