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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Harvick Keeps Piling Up Points
Kevin Harvick has five top fives in his last six starts...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted August 02, 2010   Charlotte, NC
Richard Childress (Left) and Kevin Harvick (Right) confer in the garage at Pocono Raceway. (Photo LAT Photographic)
In a year where the hot racer seems to change from week to week to week, Kevin Harvick is rocking the house in the old school NASCAR Sprint Cup style — with relentless consistency over the long, grueling 36-race calendar.

With just five races left in NASCAR’s regular season, Harvick has a huge 189-point lead over Jeff Gordon and a 260-point margin over third place Denny Hamlin. With that big a gap to his rivals, Harvick is a virtual certainty to capture the Sprint Cup regular season points title.

Harvick had another big day Sunday at Pocono Raceway, where he recovered from a first-lap wall slap to drive his No. 29 Richard Childress Chevrolet to a fourth-place finish, his fifth top five in the last six races.

During that period, Harvick has been consistently excellent on a wide range of tracks:

• On the road course at Infineon Raceway, Harvick finished third.

• Harvick was fifth on the 1.058-mile New Hampshire Motor Speedway short track.

• He won a restrictor-plate race at Daytona.

• He was runner-up on the flat, 2.5-mile Indianapolis Motor Speedway oval.

• And Sunday, Harvick was fourth at Pocono, a three-turn, 2.5-mile triangle.

Add it up and it’s been an impressive run.

“Yeah, it's been a great year,” said Harvick, who now has 10 top-five and 15 top-10 finishes this season, both tops in the series. “We keep knocking top fives off and that's what we've got to keep doing in the Chase.”

For what it’s worth, at Infineon, New Hampshire and Pocono, Harvick never led a single lap. But at all three of those races, he finished better than he started, which certainly is a sign of strength for Harvick and the RCR team.

At Pocono, Harvick qualified just 14th, but from there made steady progress as the race went on. He was 11th after 50 of 200 laps, ninth at the halfway point and sixth with 50 laps to go. That he finished fourth was especially impressive given that he took four tires on his last pit stop and wasn’t even in the top 10 when the final green flag flew on Lap 180.
Kevin Harvick makes a pit stop during the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Sunoco Red Cross Pennsylvania 500 at Pocono Raceway. (Photo LAT Photographic)

But Harvick battled hard at the end and the result was yet another top-five finish and an excellent run for the No. 29 Pennzoil-sponsored Chevrolet.

Last weekend at the Brickyard, Harvick held off Greg Biffle for second place; this time around, Biffle won, Tony Stewart was second, Carl Edwards third and Harvick fourth.

Not a victory, true, but a strong finish nevertheless for Harvick.

“Yeah, it was a long day,” Harvick said. “I got into the wall on the first lap there and we fought a little bit tight. But all in all they did a great job. The No. 16 (Greg Biffle) just got so far out there on that last restart that I thought we had a chance to win the race but we just could never run him back down. So, it was a good race and we'll go on to the next one.”

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.

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