Kevin Harvick: "It's time to get physical" as season finale nears

Not a pleasant sight, but it came with a solid fifth-place finish.

“It’s just Martinsville. That’s what it’s all about,” Harvick said after the race. “It’s championship time. It’s time to get physical.”

He wasn’t kidding.

There was a lot of rough racing in Sunday’s race – there were six cautions alone in the final stage for incidents on the track. But even aside from wrecks, there was a lot of beating and banging for position.

Butting heads with Ryan Blaney

Harvick himself was involved in a prolonged battle with Ryan Blaney at one point, with the two drivers trading body blows around the track.

After the race, the two talked on pit road, where Harvick said he made clear what he would tolerate.

“He didn’t like getting hit and I didn’t like the cheap shots, the brake checks and the hitting down the straightaway,” Harvick said of their conversation. “It’s like I told him, I said, ‘If you want to race hard and you want to run into me after I pass you, that’s fine, but slamming me down the straightaway and brake-checking me is another thing.’  

“That’s the easy way to race.”  

Both Blaney and Harvick had a lot on the line – both are among the eight drivers still eligible to win the 2017 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series championship and both had strong cars in Sunday’s First Data 500.

A win at Martinsville would allow them to compete for the series championship. A strong finish keeps them in the hunt for a spot based on points.

“Four races to go at Martinsville, playoff time and everybody is trying to get everything they can. It was a crazy finish,” Harvick said. “But for us, our goal was to score stage points. I think we scored three stage points and get a top-five.

“My goal was a top-10. The goal was to not lose it today. I'm really proud of everyone at Stewart-Haas Racing. They built this car in two weeks after our test. We were way more competitive here. And as you look at the results, they show it.

“We have bent up fenders but it looks like the whole field does.”

Both Harvick and Blaney were among those caught up in a wreck on the last lap of the race. Denny Hamlin and Blaney slid across the finish line with their cars literally locked together.

Blaney ended up with an eighth-place finish.

“On short runs I thought we were OK for 20 laps or so, but the last handful of restarts were just pandemonium. It was pretty ridiculous with everyone wrecking each other and running into each other,” Blaney said.

“I thought we were going to make it through the last one, but we just kind of got caught up off of (Turn) 4 in all that stuff. At least we salvaged a decent day. Honestly, a lot of cars got torn up, but we’ll go on to Texas and see what we have.

“It was chaos. I haven’t seen that in a long time.”