Kevin Harvick finished second in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Auto Club 500. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
Kevin Harvick is a busy man these days, leading the NASCAR Sprint Cup points standings after two races, and along with wife DeLana, operating championship-level teams in the NASCAR Nationwide and Camping World Truck Series.
So far this season, Richard Childress Racing has been surprisingly strong, with Harvick's No. 29 entry the best of the three RCR Chevrolets so far. Harvick finished a close second to Jimmie Johnson last week in Southern California and is looking for another solid effort this week.
The 2007 Daytona 500 winner, met with the media Friday morning at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where he is entered in Sunday's Shelby American, race No. 3 of 36 on the year for the Cup series.
Excerpts from Harvick's media availability follow.
TALK ABOUT YOUR OUTLOOK FOR THIS WEEKEND AT LAS VEGAS MOTOR SPEEDWAY
Based upon how everything has gone, hopefully it goes the same way. It is fun to come to the race track and know everything is going good. We have a new car this week, so we will see how it goes. We ran well here last year and hopefully we can do the same this year.
HOW DOES IT FEEL TO COME IN HERE LEADING THE POINTS? Obviously it is really early in the season to get in to points but I think it could be worse. It could be the opposite end of the spectrum. We’ll take it week by week and keep plugging away at what we need to do on a weekly basis. We’ll take it one race at a time to make the adjustments that we think we need with our cars and analyze what we did right or wrong the week before and try to keep improving on a week-to-week basis.
That is the thing when you aren’t completely struggling, you can really start to fine-tune what you are doing as far as changes and really start tweaking on the fleet of cars that you have so you can try to make little things better. That is where we are right now for at least this week until we go back to the spoiler.
CAN YOU TALK A LITTLE BIT ABOUT WHEN YOU SENSED THE TURNAROUND WAS STARTING TO HAPPEN WITHIN RCR?
From really Indy, where we took our newest stuff, and that is where we started the cycle, the new changes throughout our cars. The biggest thing is now we have a fleet of them and we are able to race them every week where last year we had one this week and you didn’t have one next week. But we had to build 40 of them so it took a while to get everything turned around and get the chassis department and body department and everything on the right page.
Indy was pretty much where it all started to turn around for us. The end of the year was a lot like the way the beginning of this year has been. We weren’t as consistent with all three cars but everybody was still searching a little bit but there was at least one if not two cars for the last five or six weeks of the season that were pretty much doing the same thing we are doing now.
