Author: Bob Pockrass
Date: Sept. 16, 2015
Kevin Harvick had led the Sprint Cup Series standings since the third week of the season until the checkered flag dropped Saturday night at Richmond International Raceway.
Poof. His points lead has vanished. He sits fifth in the standings. Welcome to the Chase for the Sprint Cup.
Not that Harvick seems all that worried. The defending Sprint Cup champion hasn't won since his two victories in March, but he has had eight runner-up finishes since then and 10 total for the year.
So what if Joe Gibbs Racing drivers have won eight of the last 11 races, including Kyle Busch winning four of those and Matt Kenseth winning three?
Harvick won't call himself the driver to beat, but he notes that his team thrived in the pressure of the 2014 Chase, the first year of the new format where four drivers are eliminated after each of the first three rounds of three races apiece, setting up a four-driver, best-finish-is-champion scenario in the season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
"It's not about stats or what's pretty or not pretty -- it's about three weeks and making it to the next round, three weeks, making it to the next round, trying to get yourself in position for Homestead," Harvick said.
"The one thing I know that we can do, we've been in pressure situations, we've succeeded in both of them at the end of the year and we've been there, done that. I didn't see anybody around us do the same thing."
The stats say that Harvick should be in good shape. He had the best average finish -- 7.69 -- of any driver in the regular season. In the past 10 races, the Stewart-Haas Racing driver has the fourth-best average at 8.6 behind Penske's Joey Logano (6.6), JGR's Busch (7.1) and Penske's Brad Keselowski (8.1).
In addition to the impressive stats by Busch, Joe Gibbs Racing drivers Denny Hamlin (9.1) and Carl Edwards (10.8) have an average finish in the past 10 races of at least eight spots better than their average over the first 16 regular-season races.
"You can't be good once every three weeks," Harvick said. "You've got to be good for 10 weeks. I know those guys have run fast. It's been a different Gibbs car that we've raced against [for the win] for the last 10 weeks. As a company, they've had some good success in winning races, but it hasn't been the same car.
"Hopefully they'll be peaky like they normally are and we can capitalize on the solid momentum we've had throughout the last two years and do what we have to do."
So does Joe Gibbs Racing have an answer? Their drivers have been a little streaky, although Busch has five top-2 finishes in the past 11 races. But he also has three finishes outside the top 10 in the past 10. Edwards has been the most consistent with a worst finish of 13th over the past nine races. Hamlin has been up and down, but he has four top-6 finishes to end the regular season.
And then there's Kenseth, who had dominating performances at Bristol and Richmond sandwiched between rough outings at Bristol and Darlington.
Harvick has had the consistency. His 978 points outscored Logano by 30 during the regular season and were the most of any driver in the first 26 races since the current points system was implemented in 2011, smashing the previous mark of 914 set by Jeff Gordon last year.
"[Harvick has] been on kind of a record deal there this year," Gibbs said. "He says they're stronger than last year. I believe that. Obviously that's a very strong car. ... We always talk about winning being super-important. To be quite truthful, being consistent is going to be a huge part of it, too.
"All 16 of these teams earned their way in. If somebody gets hot down the stretch -- we've seen it before, if somebody gets hot, they got a chance to win a championship. I just hope it's one of our cars."
To read the complete article as it appears on ESPN.com, click here.