In one of the strangest years in NASCAR history, no saga has taken more twists and turns than that of the long-running — and soon ending — owner-driver relationship between Richard Childress and Kevin Harvick.
A year ago, Harvick announced that he would leave Richard Childress Racing, his only home in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series since 2001, to join Stewart-Haas Racing in 2014.
Then, two days after saying he was leaving RCR, Harvick went out and won the November 2012 race at Phoenix International Raceway. And Sunday at the 1-mile PIR oval, damned if Harvick didn’t do it again, taking the lead on the 311th of 312 laps when Carl Edwards ran out of gas.
By capturing his second consecutive AdvoCare 500, this time over Hendrick Motorsports teammates Kasey Kahne and Jimmie Johnson, Harvick won his fourth race of the season. He will head into Sunday’s finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway third in points, 34 points in back of Johnson and six back of second place Matt Kenseth.
It would take an unlikely set of circumstances to defeat Johnson for the championship — Harvick’s crew chief, Gil Martin suggested locking Johnson in a Port-A-Potty — but no matter. This has been one of the most rewarding years of Harvick’s career.
In what surely has to rank as one of the understatements of the year, Harvick described his complicated relationship with Childress thusly: “We’ve had a lot of life lessons together.”
Those life lessons have included anything and everything, from the death of Dale Earnhardt, which thrust Harvick into the Sprint Cup Series, to the birth of Harvick’s son, Keelan, last year, to Harvick’s ugly public spat with Childress’ grandson, Ty Dillon, a couple of weeks back at Martinsville.
RCR as a team has always been the Oakland Raiders of NASCAR, the black hats with swagger, dating back to the days when Earnhardt ruled the roost. And despite the occasional in-fighting and backbiting, this team still wins, which is fairly remarkable given how fierce the competition is.
“We want the same things,” Harvick said of himself, Childress and crew chief Martin. “We want to be successful and we want to win races, and I think we have a different approach of how you approach things and how you talk about things and how you move through things. So these guys have done a good job of kind of being that glue, the glue that kind of holds it all together even when he and I are mad at each other. So in the end you want to respect each other, and these guys do a good job of explaining that and really keeping it all together.”
“At the end of the day, the one thing that we both do have is a word called respect, and we'll always have that,” said Childress.
Sunday at PIR, Harvick had a fast car, as he usually does here. And he trusted Martin to set up the strategy to win to pit, so he had to take less fuel than the competition, which meant a shorter pit stop that would give him critical track position.
“We knew if we could time it out to where we were emptying one can of gas, we know exactly how long that takes, so we waited to pit until we got to that point, and then it worked out,” said Martin. “But when you run a race like this when the tires really aren't an advantage, it comes down to the driver's tenacity in the car. It comes down to the fact of — he has to give, not a 100 percent like they've asked, you have to give 110 percent every single lap because if you let up even one lap you lose too much time.”
And that’s exactly how it played out.
Harvick said he trusted Martin to make it work.
“I know for me you just have to let it play out,” Harvick said of the in-race strategy. “You just have to sit in the car, give him the feedback and just do the best that you can because they can see a lot more than I can. He can tell you the stressful part of it.”
So when it came down to the end, Harvick had enough gas to win and Edwards didn’t have enough to finish.
“Our car was fast enough to work through traffic and keep ourselves in contention even with the other guys on the other side of that strategy, and we were able to be there at the end,” said Harvick. “Everyone was able to put just enough gas in the cars to make it to the end, and our guys got it right and the other guys were a little short.”
