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Bob PockrassNASCAR
AVONDALE, Ariz. — In a race that was supposed to be all about Kevin Harvick, Kyle Busch spoiled the party.
Pun intended.
It was an unpredictable day Sunday at the beautifully renovated ISM (formerly Phoenix) Raceway, but still ended with a partially predictable result.
The four-driver championship field will consist of the “big three” — Busch (eight wins this year), Harvick (eight) and Martin Truex Jr. (four) — and one of the hottest drivers on the circuit, Joey Logano (two), in predictable fashion.
But the way they’re heading there after Phoenix wasn’t the way many could foresee.
Harvick entered Phoenix with a cactus-sized chip on his shoulder after a 40-point penalty for an illegal spoiler in his win at Texas put him in a precarious position to advance.
While other teams did replace spoilers when the garage opened Friday, Harvick’s Stewart-Haas Racing team operated under a cloud of having manufactured a piece that teams are supposed to buy from a supplier. It didn’t seem they had much support in the garage beyond those in the SHR shirts.
But in typical bulldog Harvick fashion, he won the pole and appeared dominant in practice. His biggest threat appeared to be Chase Elliott, who has had strong runs the past couple of Phoenix races and was starting second.
The race kept to script until Lap 73, when a flat tire — likely a puncture, according to Goodyear — put Harvick a lap down and sapped it of enough handling that he was never a threat to dominate.
“I drug the splitter off,” Harvick said. “It never really handled as good after that, but we made some adjustments to our car and got ourselves back in contention there in the second stage staying out, and it worked out OK.”
Apparently some of the racing gods were looking out for Harvick, determining that no matter how egregious the infraction — one that has benched Harvick’s crew chief and car chief for the rest of the year — that a year with eight wins deserves a shot at the championship.
Afterward, a stone-faced Harvick wouldn’t say whether he felt any relief. He advanced on a day when Aric Almirola, Kurt Busch and Elliott all showed cars strong enough to challenge for the win only for Almirola to come up short in fourth and Busch and Elliott a victim of a loose Denny Hamlin car that resulted in a crash that took them both out of contention.
“Just another day,” Harvick said. “You don’t do anything different.
“I would prepare no different next week if I was out as I would if I was in. That’s what I always tell you guys; win or lose, it’s the same prep every week.”
Things worked out better than OK for Kyle Busch, who has ho-hummed his way through the playoffs with the exception of the win at Richmond in the second of the 10-race trip. He entered the race just needing to finish sixth to guarantee he would advance, and that changed to 16th after the first stage and 33rd after the second. With 46 laps left, he was locked into the playoffs.
Things fell his way even more as his strong short-run car outlasted the field that had six cautions over the last 83 laps. He won a Cup race at a track where he has not won since 2005 when driving for Hendrick Motorsports.
“I don’t think it was 100 percent necessary, but obviously it feels good to be able to score the win,” Busch said. “You always want to have good momentum on your side.
“This is the best thing for me, for our team, to be able to know that we’re ready to go for next week and we’re as best prepared as we can possibly be.”
Truex, too, didn’t need to win. He played it conservative and a 14th-place finish was fine for him.
And in some ways would have been fine for Busch. But just when some were starting to count out the 2015 champion, Busch made the statement Sunday not to turn a blind eye on the Joe Gibbs Racing team.
“If we would have come out of here with a second or third or fourth or fifth or something like that, I think that would have been a positive day, as well, that we could have rode high going into Miami next week thinking that we’d still have a good shot to be able to go out there and perform the way we need to in Miami,” Busch said.
What could have made the race truly intriguing is if Busch had opted to relinquish the lead to Almirola on a restart with 12 laps remaining. An Almirola win would have eliminated Harvick, whose eight wins this year certainly make him a bigger championship threat.
“I couldn’t really drive my pit box out there and make anything happen,” Busch crew chief Adam Stevens said. “But we were aware of the situation, mathematically. We’re not oblivious to it. … It wasn’t like we could freeze the race right there and make that situation happen.
“It wouldn’t have upset me if it did happen, but we weren’t going to do anything to make it happen.”
Next Sunday is different when it comes to trying to push the issue. A driver must make things happen to win the title. Busch knows it. Harvick knows it. Truex knows it.
They’ve all won championships in the format in which drivers enter Homestead even in points and the best finisher among the four wins the title. Logano knows it too, but has come out on the losing end twice.
“I would predict this is the best four, the closest four that have been in our sport in a long time,” Busch said.
True that. Let championship week begin.