Is Kevin Harvick losing the battle on pit road?

While he’s endured a few setbacks in the first 12 races, he insists the No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing pit crew isn’t one them.

Despite instances where Harvick wasn’t exactly “Happy” after sacrificing prime track position in the pits, the 2014 Sprint Cup champion believes the situation has “been addressed too much.”

“I think we put our guys in a bad spot because, look, these guys have won two championships; they’ve won races with Tony (Stewart) and they’ve won races with me,” Harvick said. “Some of the things that you don’t see, and the jackman was out the first several weeks and had some injuries and had to get those repaired and fixed, and so we had some curveballs that were thrown to us at the beginning of the season.” 

Harvick’s jackman Mike Casto underwent knee and shoulder surgery in the off-season. He returned at Phoenix — the site of the team’s sole win this season. 

You believe in the core nucleus of the team on the pit crew and knowing that they’ve been there before and you do support them ... It used to eat me up. 

Kevin Harvick

While this isn’t a team that wallows in the “what ifs,” certainly, having the first pit box at Richmond and Dover was a tremendous advantage for the No. 4 team. 

However, in both cases Harvick was unable to convert the opportunities into wins.

At Dover the flaws were obvious. Harvick turned over the lead twice to Carl Edwards in the first two cautions of the race — once on Lap 42 and again on Lap 120. Harvick had a seven-second lead after the first 40 laps. 

Under caution on Lap 174, Harvick dropped to 12th when the team elected to make a four-tire stop. Harvick recovered and was running fourth by the 10th caution on Lap 343. Following pit stops, he lined up sixth. When Jimmie Johnson stalled, Martin Truex Jr. checked up and Harvick plowed into the back of the No. 78 Furniture Row Toyota. 

“It shows up bad on paper and it looks bad on TV,” Harvick acknowledged. “But, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. I think we just need to get them back to their normal environment with five (lug nuts) on, five off, which it hasn’t been--as long as the rules are officiated, which are still questionable. (At Dover), as to everybody putting five on or five off, I feel good about it.”

Harvick’s confidence in his team is not misplaced. He’s having a tremendous season. Harvick has a 21-point advantage over Kyle Busch in the standings. He’s led the most laps (688) and has a remarkable average finish of 7.6. 

Pit road experiments have affected performance

Certainly with the cushion Harvick is enjoying this season, the team can afford to experiment before the Chase — even on pit road. 

“Obviously they’ve been trying to do things differently with formations and pit guns and the last stop (at Dover) was ‘Let’s just go back to normal’,” Harvicksaid. “After we crashed, they had an 11.3-second pit stop and those guys don’t have anything to prove to anybody.”

That 11.3-second stop put Harvick in the position to claim the lucky dog on the final caution with 35 laps remaining so he could recover from the earlier accident to finish 15th, one lap down. 

For Harvick, it was the first time the No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing Chevy failed to finish on the lead lap in 2016. The last time Harvick did not complete every lap in a race was during the Chase at Kansas Speedway.

Harvick has tried to be part of the solution. These days it’s extremely rare for him to loose his composure in the cockpit. He’s repeatedly asked over the radio this season what he can do during the course of a stop to improve the time spent coming on and off of pit road as well as entering and exiting the box. 

“It doesn’t affect me like it used to,” Harvick said. “These are not new problems. I think these are problems that you’re going to have. You’re going to have pit road problems. You’re just going to have things that you have to adapt to. And I think the performance of the race cars has been so good over three years that you make those comebacks and finish second, third, fourth and has masked and does and continues to mask a lot of the problems which is a good thing. You see a lot of people that have problems with their cars or have problems on pit road and don’t recover. 

“But our cars are fast enough to where we recover. We didn’t recover enough (at Dover) and a couple of the other weeks. So, it’s not something that you let tear the team down. It’s just something that you fix.”

Harvick has tremendous faith in crew chief Rodney Childers. After all, they won the 2014 Sprint Cup title together, and that helps reinforce the mindset that, if there's a problem, there's also a fix. 

“You believe in the core nucleus of the team on the pit crew and knowing that they’ve been there before and you do support them and put the pieces back together because it’s so easy to unplug something and pull pieces and parts out of situations and they just unfold fast,” Harvick said. “So, I think if there wasn’t for experiencing situations like this before, it used to eat me up. But at that particular point that part of it didn’t go well and somebody has to pick up the slack and you do the best you can in the car to pick up the pieces and move forward. It’s an ever-moving target. Once you get this one fixed, it’ll be a new target and we’ll move to something else.

“I feel good. I don’t feel like we’ve put everything together all the way through the first part of the season. All the pieces have performed well at one point or another and they’re all there. It’s just a matter of getting them all in sync.”