So if you haven’t heard, Kevin Harvick is on a pretty decent run.
The defending Champion has finished first or second the last seven straight races. The only drivers able to keep up with him this season have been Jimmie Johnson and Joey Logano, and even then both have had problems, with Johnson having a miserable Las Vegas and Logano seemingly hitting a metaphoric wall and fading back in the last quarter of most races.
At 39 Harvick still has around five more years before his decline as a driver (And who knows about that; Mark Martin and Harry Gant were still championship contending drivers in their fifties), and I doubt that Stewart-Haas Racing, with multiple solid sponsors and the best chassis/engine provider in the game with Hendrick Motorsports, will decline like Roush Fenway Racing has the last three seasons.
Rodney Childers has also proven to be one of the best crew chiefs in the game, maybe even better right now than Chad Knaus, who is probably entering the twilight of his career (Modern crew chiefs generally have a shorter career than drivers, with a notable exception in Jimmy Fennig). Childers has proven to be an excellent team builder; Michael Waltrip Racing flat out sucked before Childers came over in 2009 and helped to develop the team into an elite team over the next four seasons before leaving after 2013. It speaks volumes that MWR once again became completely rudderless as an organization when Childers left, not even being able to lure Greg Biffle from Roush last season, which really speaks volumes. I promise that if MWR actually is able to develop Brett Mofitt into a great driver, he isn’t going to win a championship with MWR.
Childers also, as noted by Darrell Waltrip last Sunday, basically built the No. 4 team from the ground up in the 2013-2014 off-season, then won a championship the first year in. Think about that for a second. Football isn’t like racing, but that is kind of like starting a new expansion team with Pete Carroll as the coach, like Childers, a relative new face who turned the Seahawks into a powerhouse, and installing Matt Ryan, like Harvick, a mid-career player who has played well but has never truly had the team to win it all, as the QB.
And then, come February, you turn the television on and you see Ryan hoisting the Lombardi after winning the Super Bowl, after one year.
History says that no, Harvick and the 4 team won’t continue this amazing run. Someday he’s going to lose an engine or get stuck on pit road or get caught up in a wreck. Then we get to see just how good this team really is. The best players, regardless of sport, will perform when it’s pouring, not just raining. Can he join the ranks of drivers and teams such as his boss Tony Stewart in 2011, where he went from saying “We shouldn’t be in the Chase” to hoisting the Cup in just three months’ time? We shall see.
Fontana Preview
Favorite (Outside of Kevin Harvick)
I’ve gotta go with K. Busch……. Wait, you’re telling me Kyle is still out with his injuries? I already know that, I’m talking about the other K. Busch. Kurt showed he hasn’t lost a step last Sunday, and with Kyle on the shelf he is the best here in the Gen 6, with an average finish of fourth in the last two races here.
One To Watch
Kyle Larson opened a lot of eyes in this race last year. The 2014 Rookie Of The Year almost won, if it wasn’t for the other Kyle blocking we’d be talking about defending race winner Kyle Larson. Larson is hungry for a victory, and with a second in Cup last season and his first Xfinity series win the same weekend, expect him to be a factor on Sunday.
The Dark Horse
Paul Menard has finished eighth and ninth here the last two seasons. Don’t expect a win, but do expect another under the radar top-10.
A brief correction from last week. For the rankings I posted, comparing all Cup drivers from 2013 and 2014’s first two full time seasons in the sport, I forgot to post, of all people, Kevin Harvick’s statline. Harvick, with three victories, 11 top-fives, and 24 top-10s, would be 10th in the ranking, with everybody below Kyle Busch being a rank below what they are in the article.
Harvick’s first two seasons are well known for being a roller coaster of emotions, from the grief in replacing the late Dale Earnhardt Sr., to triumph in winning three races including an emotional and iconic Atlanta win three weeks following Earnhardt’s death, to anger when he was suspended for the spring Martinsville race in 2002 after running into Coy Gibbs the day before in the Truck race after Gibbs wrecked him. Harvick, already on probation following an incident earlier in the year with Greg Biffle at Bristol, was suspended and relived by Kenny Wallace in the Cup Race.
Maybe, once he comes back from injury, there is hope for a Kyle Busch championship after all.
Speaking of Martinsville, they’ve changed hotdog brands once again. I’d be amazed if Jesse Jones hotdogs aren’t back at Martinsville by the start of the Cup race there on March 29. They’ve tried to change the hotdogs before and it has never worked out.
If they don’t, it really is a shame that a track like Martinsville, with two dates a year (And thus plenty of money from the new television deal), will screw with its long time partners (Jesse Jones had been at the Speedway before there even was a NASCAR, starting with a handshake deal in 1947) and race fans just to make more money. Money that I doubt any of the race teams will see, or if they do see it, it will most definitely be pennies on the dollar.
It seems like the France family, who majority own Martinsville Speedway owner ISC, either delight in moving races around or off the schedule for no real good reason (Somehow Darlington on Labor Day went from being too hot after years of it not being hot in 2004 to suddenly not being hot again in 2015) or messing around with what has been around for years. Instead of buying and then fixing Rockingham and making sure it had the resources to stay on the Cup schedule, it was decided that ISC needed a track in Kansas and Chicagoland, even though the Rockingham makeover would have been cheaper and would have led to better races, continuing the track’s history.
It isn’t just ISC, either. Atlanta looked horrible a couple of weeks ago, and Bruton Smith has been wanting that second Las Vegas date for years now. As far as I know, Bruton has three options to get that second Las Vegas date- replace the second Charlotte race, replace the second Loudon race, or replace Atlanta and move dates around to get Vegas later in the year. And because I know he won’t get rid of Loudon because, you know, that makes too much sense, it’s either the heart of NASCAR in Charlotte or the birthplace of stock car racing in Atlanta that will be hurt in this deal.
Then again, Smith could always just buy a track and pull it off the calendar, like he did to North Wilkesboro, which narrows it down to Dover and Pocono (We’ll find Martians before Smith buys Indianapolis). I’d love for it to be Pocono. Can we get rid of Pocono? That would be nice.
Good piece. I agree about the hotdogs, I lived most of my life in Martinsville before moving to Concord last year and it seems a shame to change them. Maybe the fans will buy up a bunch of the Valleydale dogs and chuck them onto the track during the parade laps. That would be funny. I have to disagree about Rockingham though, I never went in person but on TV I always found the races boring, that track surface chewed up the tires and the drivers had to spend the majority of each run slowing down as not to spin. Not saying that a short truck or Xfinity race wouldn’t be good there, but the 400 and 500 milers… eh not so much. i guess if you really think about it the first 2/3 of any long race are king of boring except for the pit stops. Unless you are at Bristol, Martinsville or Darlington and the track gets hungry. The cool thing about the big speedways in person is that even though the race itself might be boring it’s still cool when the cars go by you at 200mph. That’s something Rockingham just couldn’t deliver.