Kevin Harvick's Vegas Domination Shows NASCAR New Rules Haven't Kicked in Yet
While managing in the minor leagues, the late Jim Beauchamp was fond, on his team’s lesser nights, of grandiosely removing his cap and turning it over. “Sometimes, boys,” he’d say to me and others, “you just got to tip your cap to the opposition.”
They don’t tip caps in NASCAR. They eat dust. Kevin Harvick’s Chevrolet threw up gobs of it in dominating Sunday’s Kobalt 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Three races into the Sprint Cup season, the sport is alarmingly simple. Joey Logano won Daytona. Harvick was second. Jimmie Johnson won Atlanta. Harvick was second. Logano and Johnson had trouble at Las Vegas, leaving … anyone, anyone, Bueller? … Harvick to win, virtually lock up a spot in the faraway Chase and seize the points lead by nine over Dale Earnhardt Jr.
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Harvick. Very good, Bueller.
| Date | Track | Start | Finish | Laps Led |
| 11/2/14 | Texas | 5 | 2 | 2 |
| 11/9/14 | Phoenix | 3 | 1 | 264 |
| 11/16/14 | Homestead | 5 | 1 | 54 |
| 2/22/15 | Daytona | 11 | 2 | 0 |
| 3/1/15 | Atlanta | 2 | 2 | 116 |
| 3/8/15 | Las Vegas | 18 | 1 | 142 |
Harvick is the reigning champion. Dating back to his championship season, he has finished first or second in six consecutive races, winning three of them. Apparently, he has a team at Stewart-Haas Racing that did not spend its winter being complacent.
"We just have to keep our heads down and keep doing everything that we've been doing,” Harvick said on the Fox telecast. “This isn't a bunch of guys that are just going to go out and brag. We're going to race every week like we’ve never won a race before. That's the kind of determination that you need when you’re going to do this stuff."
Not that there haven’t been surprises. In the offseason, NASCAR officials changed the rules in what was widely considered an attempt to improve competition at intermediate tracks like Las Vegas and Atlanta. Somehow, by reducing horsepower and downforce, speeds at the two tracks have risen.
Risen! By lessening! It’s addition by subtraction. It’s literally figurative.
Back on January 26, during the annual Media Tour, NASCAR CEO Brian France provided an overview of the changes.
“… That’s clearly the hardest thing we do, by the way, because we’re balancing safety, we’re balancing costs, we’re balancing a whole bunch of different ideas and agendas and opinions,” he said, “but at the end of the day, that’s what makes NASCAR safe, unbelievably tight competition, and we can do all the format things that we want to do and that we should do, but nothing takes the place of rules that are relatively inexpensive.
“I say ‘relatively,’ and most importantly, creating safe, exciting competition.”
So far, the safety issue (and Kyle Busch’s injury) has NASCAR scrambling to upgrade its tracks’ walls, and the past two races have been … largely … snoozers.
Las Vegas had a major problem with attrition, that being the attrition of potential winners. Logano dominated the early stages and faltered due to his own mistakes, a pair of pit-road speeding penalties. Johnson tracked down Logano and appeared to have the strongest car for another considerable chunk, but then he suffered recurring tire problems and, thus, recurring impacts with outside walls that were, fortunately, SAFER barriers.
One of Johnson’s problems was also Jeff Gordon’s. While trailing Johnson’s Chevy when its right-front tire failed, Gordon tangled with the car driven by Jeb Burton.
Harvick, who began the day with a modest 18th-place starting position, was thus left alone to thrash the field, which he proceeded to do. Others—Earnhardt, the surprisingly strong Martin Truex Jr., a Ryan Newman here, a Brad Keselowski there—could keep Harvick in sight.
For a while. Until someone told him they were gaining.
"He was getting bigger in my mirror,” said runner-up Truex, who apparently meant to say “windshield” in the post-race media conference, “but I believe he was playing with everybody. He was just really, really strong.
“Live and learn. Those guys have been really strong for a year, and we are just getting our stuff rolling. Hopefully, we'll get it tuned up and be able to run with them soon."
Therein lies the hope. It should come as no surprise that the team of the reigning champion (Harvick), the team that has won six of the past nine (Johnson) and the team that won five races and was a Chase finalist last year (Logano), should adapt to a new set of rules with more precision than everyone else.
“Everybody is just clicking,” said Rodney Childers, the winning crew chief, in the media conference. “You've seen that over the years of a group of people that get going and click week in and week out, and it's fun to come to the race track. When everybody is having fun, it doesn't seem like a job and you just end up working that much harder.
“These guys have worked over this winter, and this is one that was on our list. We felt like, coming here last year, this was a track that Kevin had never won at. He said that it would mean the world to him to come here and win.”
The domination of a few drivers has got to change, though, and, inevitably, it will. Others will emerge. They just haven’t yet.
"I kept [Harvick] in sight all day, but that was about it,” Denny Hamlin, who finished fifth, said. “I just could see him. Besides that, those guys are on another level as far as speed is concerned, so we're just trying to plug away and do all the right things.”
No need to be overly alarmed. The cream has risen swiftly to the top. Rules NASCAR officials devised to increase competition will eventually start to balance the leaderboard. It’s looking awfully static at the moment.
All quotes are taken from NASCAR media, team and manufacturer sources unless otherwise noted.
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