Kevin Harvick finishes third after two tire punctures and shifter issue
FORT WORTH, Texas – Kevin Harvick finished third on Sunday at Texas. It was Harvick's 21st top-five finish of 2015. Big deal, right?
Given what Harvick and his team overcame throughout the course of the race, definitely.
Harvick suffered two punctured tires and had to battle a bad shifter handle for the last quarter of the race. The car popped out of gear and Harvick was forced to use one hand to steer and keep his right hand on the shifter handle to prevent the car from popping out of gear.
The team even gave him a bungee cord to use to keep the shifter in place.
"It hadn’t missed a gear or jammed a gear or anything like that," Harvick said of his transmission. "It shifted smooth all weekend. I was just going along like normal. One lap, all of a sudden, it just pops out of gear in the middle of the straightaway. So, I don’t really know. That’s happened to us several times, so we definitely need to figure that out.”
Harvick got the bungee cord in the race's final caution period. He didn't use it.
“No, I never found anything to hook it to," Harvick said. "I don’t trust those bungees anyway. I would rather just sit there and hold it and take my chances.”
He started the final restart sixth and ended up third after passing Kyle Busch, Jamie McMurray and Martin Truex Jr., who had a right front wheel loose on the final 18-lap run of the race.
The first tire puncture happened early in the race and Harvick got a caution immediately after it. The second came under green, but just before a pit window. Harvick ended up pitting more than a dozen laps ahead of the rest of the field. As the race stayed green, Harvick cycled to the lead briefly before he was swallowed up by the cars with fresh tires. However, the race's final caution gave him a chance to get back on equal tires with the rest of the field.
Through two races of the second round, Harvick is second in points among the seven drivers vying for the three remaining spots at Homestead for the title. And he's just a point behind Kyle Busch heading to his best track on the schedule: Phoenix.
Harvick has won the past four races at Phoenix and five of the past six. He's to Phoenix what Jimmie Johnson has become to the fall race at Texas. There is no favorite at the 1-mile oval other than the No. 4 car, even if he's had a ridiculous eventful Chase. There was the tire rub at Charlotte, running out fuel at New Hampshire, the win at Dover, the Talladega crash and a tire rub at Martinsville. It's not a complete list either.
“Hectic," Harvick said when describing the Chase. "Even Charlotte wasn’t 100 percent smooth. The cars have been performing well. We’ve just had to overcome things week after week after week. I guess those are character-building moments as you go through those weekend, but we’ve managed to survive and advance and that’s what we’ve got to do next week."
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
