“I knew I wasn’t going to catch him once he got by,” Harvick admitted. “He went by me like he was making qualifying laps. He did that three or four times during the night. So I knew I was in trouble.
“[But] we didn’t give up. We went as hard as we could and came up one short.”
“I knew we were in trouble there at the end because it took our car 15 or 20 laps to get going,” Harvick said. “But hey, that’s a long ways from where we’ve been. We led a bunch of laps [Sunday night], something we haven’t been able to do in a while.”
“My car was good 
halfway through the run to the end of the runs,” Harvick said. “I would give up five, six, seven spots at the beginning of the run. That didn’t pay off for us in the end.”
“I’m happy,” Harvick said. “Obviously, you want to go out and win. But from where we’ve been this year, I think [Sunday night] feels like a win. We’ll just take this momentum and hopefully keep it going.”
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
Kevin Harvick w
ants out; Richard Childress says not yet. Is this a relationship that can weather another year bound by contract? “Richard Childress Racing has a multi-year contract with Shell-Pennzoil that includes the 2010 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season. Shell-Pennzoil remains a great partner for RCR and Kevin Harvick as well as our sport overall. RCR also has a multi-year contract with Kevin Harvick that includes the 2010 season. That said, Shell will be the sponsor and Kevin will be the driver of RCR’s No. 29 Shell-Pennzoil Chevrolet Impala SS in 2010.” -Richard Childress
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