Author: Jim Utter
Date: Nov. 17, 2014
HOMESTEAD, Fla. When NASCAR unveiled its Chase format this season, the goal was to emphasize winning.
Kevin Harvick’s run to his first Sprint Cup Series championship not only emphasized winning, but it embraced it.
In fact, it required it.
Say what you want about a driver with one win (Denny Hamlin) and one with none (Ryan Newman) making it to the championship race, but in the end, winning is what determined the series champion, providing an emphatic exclamation point to the season.
Harvick, whose No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing team was the fastest all season but didn’t have the trips to Victory Lane to show for it, needed a win at Phoenix in the next-to-last race to become one of the final four title contenders. He got it.
Then during the final laps of Sunday’s Ford 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway, Harvick needed another victory to claim the championship while holding off Newman.
He got that, too.
“It turned out you had to go for broke just to be competitive, and I think that’s really what this format has turned every week into over the last 10 weeks,” Harvick said. “If you want to win the championship, you’re going to have to figure out how to win races.
“In the end you had to win the race to win the championship, and it all worked out.”
If Harvick had faltered late, Newman would have inherited the lead, which in turn could have handed him the win and the championship.
That fact was not lost on other competitors.
“Well, I think it showed that we had the right four in the final bracket. We were up front – all four of us – most of the day,” Hamlin said.
Harvick, 38, now has a Cup series title to go along with two championships in what currently is the Nationwide Series he won with Richard Childress Racing. He and crew chief Rodney Childers joined SHR during the offseason.
In his NASCAR career, Harvick has 28 wins in the Cup series, 44 in what is the Nationwide series and 14 in Truck, where he made his first national series start in 1995.
He finished third in the Cup standings three times at RCR but had never been as close to winning a title as he was Sunday.
Perhaps it was only fitting that to earn his first title, he needed one of the best performances of his career – by himself and his team.
“I just feel like this format was made for us this year because of the fact that we had to build a new team,” Harvick said. “We made some mistakes along the way.
“I don’t think any of us ever dreamed of making all those mistakes in front of the world, leading races and the things that we were doing. But in the end I feel like it all built up to this moment to be able to experience and handle the things that we did” to win.
For Childers, this was an intense 10-week playoff, but worth the wait.
“I’ve never been involved in a championship run before with the old rules or anything, but for me, it was a lot of fun,” he said. “I think NASCAR did a really, really good job of making it exciting for the fans and everybody, really all the teams, too.
“You know, it was the best thing that I’ve ever been involved in, and I don’t know how to explain it any better than that.”
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