Kevin Harvick’s win is as it should be
Kevin Harvick got it right Sunday.
And so did NASCAR, which got an amazing race in the season finale that crowned Harvick the 2014 champion.
Harvick won both the race and the Chase for the Sprint Cup, and he had to do all of that because Ryan Newman finished second Sunday and lost the title by exactly half a second. All four of the last men standing in the Chase championship hunt, in fact, ran in the top six in the Ford EcoBoost 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway for most of the day.
It was Harvick who won, though, and that’s as it should be. Harvick led the most laps over the course of the 36-race season. Most of the time, he had the fastest car and then drove the wheels off it, too. The win at Homestead was his fifth of the year.
“In the end, it turned out you had to go for broke just to be competitive,” Harvick said.
To have the winner of the final race also be your champion is terrific symmetry, but it rarely happens. It’s only the second time it has occurred at Homestead in Sprint Cup racing. Tony Stewart did the same thing in 2011 – then became Harvick’s car owner in 2014.
At 38, Harvick was the oldest of the four finalists and had flirted with the title several times before. He had finished third in three of the past four seasons.
“This new format has been stressful, but the racing has been phenomenal,” Harvick said.
His wife, DeLana, and their 2-year-old son, Keelan, joined Harvick in Victory Lane Sunday, along with everyone else who had anything to do with the No. 4 car.
Keelan was preoccupied with his new hat and kept playing with it. He happily ignored his father when Harvick asked: “Can you say Daddy won?”
The Harvicks just moved from the Kernersville area to Charlotte this past week, so they threw a move in on top of all the stress associated with the final round of NASCAR’s playoffs.
“This week ate me up,” Harvick said.
Harvick joked afterward that he plans to “sleep for a week,” but there will be no time for that now. DeLana Harvick and Kevin had purposely not talked about what would happen if he won the series championship, thinking it would be a jinx, but he’s going to be very busy recounting Sunday’s story and promoting the gospel of NASCAR.
Harvick hit racing’s equivalent of back-to-back walk-off homers the past two weeks in his No. 4 Budweiser Chevrolet. He entered Phoenix a week ago in the No. 8 playoff spot and needed to win the race to even make the final four. He did.
Then, on Sunday, Harvick won yet again. Anything less than No. 1 and Newman might have become NASCAR’s first series champion at the highest level without a victory during the season. Or perhaps Denny Hamlin (who finished seventh but led 50 laps) would have been able to nurse a late lead longer. But Harvick made several magnificent moves, including a late one where he blasted up through the middle of four cars and went from sixth to second in a single lap.
Said Stewart of Harvick, one of his closest friends: “He’s definitely a game-changer.”
To Harvick, it all was still blurry a couple of hours after the race as he chomped on a piece of pizza. “I have no idea how we took the lead,” he said. “I have no clue.”
The fact that all four drivers in the final quartet stayed at or near the top almost all afternoon really juiced up what has often been a boring race. This was the first time NASCAR had ever reset the points so that the final four drivers were dead even with one race to go, and that was the most inspired move of all in these playoffs’ latest incarnation.
It made for a race in which you not only had to keep an eye on the lead, but also on all four drivers in the championship hunt. And they were almost always near the front. It was one of the best overall finales in Cup history.
“NASCAR has got to be thrilled with that,” said driver Brad Keselowski, who wasn’t involved in the final four but finished third Sunday.
Harvick had to survive three restarts in the final 20 laps as caution flags flew constantly toward the end. Crew chief Rodney Childers had called for four new tires at that point, and Harvick had to drop briefly back to 14th place to get them.
Frustrated by that, Harvick said on the radio the four-tire change “couldn’t have gone any worse.”
Hamlin stayed out with old tires, and Newman had only two new ones by then. And then they restarted, and Harvick started passing people. He had the lead by lap 260 of the 267-lap race.
On the last restart, Harvick said: “I was just going to hold the pedal down and hope for the best.” He ran away from Newman one final time, and that was that.
Ultimately, Childers’ pit strategy worked out, too. But that’s in large part because the right guy was pressing the accelerator.
This story was originally published November 16, 2014 at 9:58 PM with the headline "Kevin Harvick’s win is as it should be."