Third-place Harvick minding his own business heading to Texas

Third-place Harvick minding his own business heading to Texas

By Jim Pedley
Special to Sporting News NASCAR Wire Service

(November 3, 2011)

A lot of the attention around the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup this week has been directed at the verbal throw-down that erupted between drivers Tony Stewart and Carl Edwards after last Sunday's race at Martinsville Speedway.

And while the challenge issued by Stewart (who has won three of the first seven playoff races) to Edwards (who is the points leader heading to the AAA Texas 500 at Texas Motor Speedway this weekend) has made for good theater, it has taken the spotlight off of the driver who is third in points—Kevin Harvick.

If Harvick—who is 21 points behind Edwards, 13 behind Stewart and who finished third in the Chase last year—is having his feelings hurt by not being included in the high-profile word war, he's not showing it.

Asked about being No. 3 this week, the Richard Childress Racing driver simply said, "The goal (at Texas) is just to keep chipping away at the lead. We got a little behind at Talladega (where he finished 32nd), but we just got to keep doing what we're doing."

The chipping process picks up on Sunday with the 500-miler at the 1.5-mile TMS quad-oval.

It's a place where Harvick has yet to win in Cup, but it's a place where he has been very consistent: In 17 starts at the place, he has eight top 10s and an average finish of 12.9.

His last two runs at TMS kind of tell the Harvick story there; he finished sixth a year ago but was 20th in a poorly handling car in April of this year.

"Last year everything was rock solid," he said. "Obviously, you want that consistency and the things to go with that."

Edwards and Stewart have both won races at TMS; Edwards has three victories and Stewart one. But Harvick's average finish is slightly better than Stewart's and much better than Edwards'.

Harvick has finished in the top seven at TMS three times in his last four starts there.

Harvick's best finish at Texas is third. That came in 2006. But Texas would seem to be Harvick's kind of track, as 10 of the 18 wins he has in Cup have come at high-speed ovals that measure 1.5-miles around or more.

He doped out TMS by saying, "Texas is a really fast racetrack, and the banking is where you can really feel how fast you are going. It's one of those few racetracks where you feel the speed in the car. The unique part about Texas is that you have that big speed for about three or four laps, and as you go through the tire run, the speed really drops off a tremendous amount. But, from a driver standpoint, you have got a lot of options here and the racetrack has a lot of bumps that are great for character and you have to make your car work good and you have to get up off Turn 2, but you can run all over the racetrack."

As far as running his mouth, it appears Harvick is content to leave that to others.

As Stewart was telling Edwards, "He better be worried," and Edwards was firing back by telling Stewart to bring it on, and as TMS promoters were putting their graphics departments to work on advertisements which mimicked boxing posters, Harvick was taking the introspective approach.

After finishing fourth at Martinsville to jump up two spots in the points standings, he was saying, "We've got three to go and we're closer now then we were last week."