INDIANAPOLIS — Kevin Harvick walked out of his garage stall at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, sat down on a stack of tires, and proceeded to field a flurry of questions from reporters wondering if he wants to leave Richard Childress Racing after this year. Through it all, he wore an expressionless mask worthy of a championship poker player going all in on a bluff.

And yet, his frustration with what he’s called the worst season of his racing career is clearly evident. A championship contender for most of his tenure at NASCAR’s premier level, Harvick came to Indianapolis a distant 25th in points and with no real shot at the year-end championship Chase. It’s been 90 races since his last victory, that knife’s-edge triumph over Mark Martin at Daytona now more than two and a half years ago. His struggles are reflected throughout RCR, which after two years of placing three drivers in the Chase is on the verge of being locked out.

For the No. 29 team, it’s been problem after problem after problem. A change of crew chief earlier in the year seemed to have little effect. “I don’t think moving from one crew chief to another necessarily did anything but make people realize that the problem was somewhere else other than our crew chiefs,” Harvick said. There are have been accidents and parts failures too many to count, only adding to the frustration of a driver who hasn’t cracked the top 10 since Atlanta in March.

“There’s really nothing being looked at,” he said. “Everybody’s kind of stale right now, and everything is just not fast enough, and everything just isn’t running well enough to be where everybody wants to be. So I don’t really have anything to look at, or look forward to, or have anything cooking, or anything different, or anything like that. Right now, I’m the driver of the Shell-Pennzoil RCR Chevrolet, and that’s what I intend to continue to focus on.”  -KH

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