Kevin Harvick uses setbacks to reach next level

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Kevin Harvick certainly didn’t want a penalty last week. But even he has to admit that sometimes he performs even better when he’s frustrated.

Case in point: While he has traditionally performed well at Phoenix International Raceway, he appeared to have a dominant car until a flat tire Sunday. But he overcame that, rallying to advance to vie for the NASCAR Cup Series title this weekend at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

That performance came a weekend after NASCAR penalized him 40 points and suspended his crew chief and car chief for two races for manufacturing a spoiler that didn’t meet league specifications. His spoiler is supposed to be purchased from an approved vendor.

Harvick has said that he continually seeks new avenues for motivation. He has plenty thanks to that penalty and any perception that went along with it, as he competes against Kyle Busch, Martin Truex Jr. and Joey Logano for the championship Sunday at Homestead.

“There’s always some incentive in proving people that you can do something that isn’t what they think you should do,” Harvick said Thursday at championship media day. “You can look at my whole career. [People said] you shouldn’t win, you couldn’t win. Then you did.

“Last week, it was ‘this penalty is going to slow them down.’ When they take 10 away, we find 20. It’s just the mentality of the race team. It’s always [to] push the limits. When they back you against the wall, make it better than it was before.”

Crew chief Rodney Childers indicated the Texas race was the first with the spoiler. As far as the perception from outside, that is the biggest question from Harvick’s biggest competitor in 2018.

“The first question across my mind was how long?,” Kyle Busch said. “How long has that been going on? What else are they doing? … Besides that, there’s the line [SHR VP Greg] Zipadelli used where there’s probably not a car in this garage area that’s legal.

“It’s just a matter of how you interpret the rules sometimes, and what everybody’s doing to try to push those and push those envelopes. If you’re not pushing, you’re not trying.”

Harvick has learned to handle these situations a little bit better than he did earlier in his career, a career that features a number of face-to-face confrontations, including leaping over a car to grab the throat of Greg Biffle.

If he wanted to grab a throat or vent over the penalty last week, he didn’t show it.

“If I was jumping over the hood of a car right now, went into my house, had a 6-year-old saw me trampling, do you know how embarrassed I would be to walk in the front door and answer that question, ‘Hey, Dad, why did you jump over that guy’s car, grab him by the throat?'” said Harvick, the father of a 6-year-old boy and a 10-month-old girl.

“[I’d respond that] well, probably wasn’t the right thing to do. Then it would get more embarrassing as you take him to school, drive through the car-pool lines to see his teachers that are all watching as well.”

Then again, Harvick still has his moments.

“I don’t say all the right things, do the right things,” Harvick said. “As you go through life, I would hope we all mature from a life standpoint to be able to be a better person. I still screw up a lot.”

One notable area where Harvick tends to screw up less is on the team radio. He has become less vocal, less inflammatory when his team makes a mistake. He was fairly calm throughout the Phoenix race after the flat tire and didn’t bark orders or flip out.

“I learned over the last five years, the less I say on the radio — the less I say in general, for the most part — is usually more effective for my team,” Harvick said. “In that moment, we had controlled all the things that we could control very well throughout the whole weekend. That was what we needed to do on that particular weekend in order to get here.

“In that particular moment, the only thing that you could do is put the tire on, go back out on the racetrack, start over again. That’s what we did.”

Earlier this week on his SiriusXM NASCAR radio show, Harvick was philosophical about the penalty. He said all of the Stewart-Haas Racing cars had the same spoiler and indicated that NASCAR had not focused in inspecting that area of the car.

“You have to follow the trends and you have to follow the things that you think are going to happen and not going to happen in inspection, and that is part of the game,” Harvick said on his show.

“It’s an innovative game and it has always been innovative, from the crew chiefs and teams, and fortunately for me I’m on a team that likes to push the limits and likes to race, so that’s part of it.”

Harvick said on the show that sometimes a situation like the one they were in forces the crew members to increase their focus. He said Thursday he feels his team races with a chip on its shoulder every week, although interim crew chief Tony Gibson — filling in for the suspended Childers — didn’t necessarily see it.

“They don’t really have a chip on their shoulder about anyone in particular or anything,” Gibson said. “It’s just they want to show everybody that they are the best and they deserve to be in this position to fight for a championship.

“All these guys want to step up and show Rodney that, you know what, we are a great team, and you have built an awesome race team here, and we want to show you how mature we are as a group and how we can function as a group, even when our leader is not with us. We can still follow your lead and we can still get this done.”

The motivation for the driver and his team changes, Harvick said.

“I think that target [of performance] moves throughout the year,” Harvick said. “You get into a situation like you had after Texas, then it’s your spoiler. At the beginning of the year it was the window [penalty following the Vegas win]. There’s a number of things.

“You could take the spoiler off, you’re going to have the same result at Texas. You come to Phoenix, you qualify on the pole, you do all those things [well].”

That begs the question: If he would have had the same result at Texas, why even have that spoiler on the car?

“I didn’t say it would make as much downforce [without that spoiler],” Harvick said with a laugh.

It was one of those laughs that show Harvick is in a good frame of mind entering the Homestead weekend. He knows his team got caught doing something it shouldn’t, but if it can be used as motivation, he’ll use it and run with it … hopefully to his second Cup title.

It’s not that a championship isn’t motivation enough. Finding different sources of motivation is what makes Harvick tick. So if it’s a penalty or having his back against the wall, he’ll use it.

“Sometimes I just laugh,” Harvick said. “You keep yourself in the game. Sometimes you know situations, you get that adrenaline going. In those situations you just have to kind of walk out of there and chuckle sometimes because of the fact that it just seems to happen a lot.

“It’s part of what makes it fun. You can crumble and take those situations and fall apart, or you can take those situations and succeed, chuckle on the way out.”