Harvick's team in championship position
Kevin Harvick may be NASCAR's newest million-dollar man, but he's worth much more than that to team owner Richard Childress.
When he looks at Kevin Harvick, now 31, Childress sees a driver who has grown into one of the sport's top talents and a man capable of managing a race on the track and a team off of it. He's a maturing driver who has continually learned how to make a team perform as a whole while constantly gaining an understanding of how that sometimes simply cannot happen.
As a Busch Series and Craftsman Truck Series team owner, Kevin Harvick now sees the difficulties in pulling a team together and has a greater understanding of all the things that can and sometimes will go wrong. As a driver who started his Cup career with wins then struggled through a pair of subpar seasons, he's grown into the kind of guy that can lead his group through troubled waters and rally them to greater heights.
Once more living up to the promise of his debut season, Kevin Harvick has quietly and confidently become one of the sport's top drivers. He's stayed under the radar since winning the season-opening Daytona 500, but that may have merely served to lull the competition into forgetting how tough of a competitor he can be.
With his win in the all-star race, Kevin Harvick checked another of NASCAR's prestigious race wins off of his to-do list. Watching his team compete through the weekend, and listening to them speak of the future, one recognizes quickly that victories in premier races are just the tip of the iceberg.
While others may have forgotten to think about Kevin Harvick when considering the 2007 Nextel Cup championship, he and his team clearly have their sights set on a run for the title. Could he be the spoiler to the Hendrick Motorsports domination that has overshadowed the opening months of the season? Perhaps.
Has he been this year's forgotten man? Absolutely.
"This year we have been able to have a couple of key wins now," Kevin Harvick says. "After Daytona, we capitalized on the performance side of it; we just haven't had the breaks going our way. We were strong enough to not have disasters and are still where we need to be in the top 12 in points.
"I think that shows the strength of our team, knowing we have had trouble but we haven't been a disaster when we have had those bad days."
In fact, Kevin Harvick and his Todd Berrier-led team have shown an incredible ability to overcome those setbacks and turn a potential heartbreaker into a decent showing. They've shown maturity in holding things together when the performance slipped from time to time and the cohesiveness to attack the problem as a unit.
"I am just amazed year after year watching the growth and experience and how Kevin Harvick has come to himself the last two or three years," Childress said. "He just gets better and better, he is smarter and he is making a lot of smart decisions."
Now, with Saturday's win in the all-star race, they've also gained a boost in confidence and momentum - and that is something that makes the team even more dangerous to the competition.
Kevin Harvick says the idea that the team has lagged since Daytona is wrong. He's had five top-10 finishes in points races and is eighth in the standings. And he's endured a bit of misfortune on the track that has kept him from building on that win.
At California he was running with the leaders when a tire went flat with four laps to go. At Bristol and Martinsville he was in contention for the win. Those are signs to the team that they have taken their game to a new level, even if they don't have a string of wins to show for it.
And the good days have come at opportune times. Kevin Harvick has moved among the sport's elite and can now place his all-star trophy next to those for the Daytona 500 and the Brickyard 400.
How does that feel? Kevin Harvick laughs that it means the team just lacks a championship, then takes a more modest approach to that success.
"We have been fortunate to have won both the Daytona 500 and the Brickyard 400 and now the all-star race," he said. "Just winning races in the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series is hard to do. I am fortunate to be with a good team, be with a good owner who has been in the sport a long time and able to capitalize in situations when we have been in them.
"It is pretty special to put your name on all of those trophies."
Now, they're aiming for more. With the strong performance at Lowe's Motor Speedway, the team has renewed confidence entering this Sunday's Coca-Cola 600. Berrier says that the fact that the team performed well on a 1.5-mile oval, a type of track on which they've struggled this season, is a positive step.
While Kevin Harvick and his group must certainly be thinking about a potential championship, they are keeping their focus on each race week to week.
"I think right now you just have to try to win races and be competitive week in and week out and try to position yourself in the Chase and then hopefully have a good plan at the end so you can go out and race for a championship," Kevin Harvick said.
In the long run, isn't that how championships are won anyway?
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