Kevin Harvick Scores First Top-10 Since Richmond

 After several months of agonizingly bad finishes, on Saturday, July 12 Kevin Harvick scored his first top-10 finish since the May race at Richmond. 

The driver of the #29 Richard Childress owned Chevrolet finished third in the 2008 Lifelock.com 400 Spring Cup Series race at Chicagoland Speedway, just behind 2007 Cup champion Jimmie Johnson and race winner Kyle Busch, who dominated n his Joe Gibbs Toyota and has now won seven races on the year in the Cup series.

Harvick ran in the top-10 for 244 of the 267 circuits, and seemed poised to take a shot at the lead when Johnson and Busch made contact while racing for the lead on the final lap of the race.  In his post-race interview, Harvick explained that he just couldn’t get to the two cars and had to settle for third.

The track in Joliet, Illinois was definitely a date Harvick and his team had circled on the calendar—the driver won the inaugural race at the track in 2001 and backed it up in 2002, winning the first two Cup events held at the track. 

He also has two Busch (now Nationwide) series wins, including last year.  The track has usually been very kind to Harvick—Saturday night’s third-place run marks his third straight top-five, although oddly enough, Harvick did not lead any laps this time around.

Harvick has shown in the past to be a very streaky driver, so logic suggests this finish may be the proverbial "light at the end of the tunnel" for Harvick fans wishing for the team to break out of its funk. 

This finish may lead to a run similar to what he had in 2003, where he nearly won this event for third year in a row, and then promptly reeled of six top-five finishes in the next six races, including a trio of back-to-back-to-back second-place finishes.

The team’s recent stretch of bad finishes includes wrecks at Dover, Darlington, and Sonoma, all of which handed Harvick 30-something finishes that drove him out of the top-12 in points.  Saturday’s finish moves him, unofficially, back into the Chase in ninth place.