Photo Credit: Noel Lanier
Over the course of the last 11 races, eight of them have been won by Joe Gibbs Racing drivers, with Kyle Busch snagging four wins, Matt Kenseth winning three races and Carl Edwards scoring a single win. Even with that statistic, Kevin Harvick says that he isn’t worried about the JGR drivers come time for the Chase.
“I’ve raced against the Gibbs cars before,” Harvick said on media day. “We’re going to pound them into the ground. That’s what I think. Hopefully they’ll beat themselves.”
Though for Harvick, the confidence comes natural as he has been strong in the last 11 races as he has scored eight top-five finishes, including a pair of runner-up finishes. Harvick’s confidence also comes from winning the Chase for the Championship last season, saying the experience will guide him through the rest of the year.
“It’s not just about having the fastest car at a particular point,” Harvick pointed out. “It’s about having experience to go out and handle the emotions of 10 weeks, and I think as you go into these 10 weeks, you have to put it all together and there’s a lot more than racing to handle.”
The comments, though, haven’t fazed the JGR team as Edwards says it’s just talk, and the “statistics and our performance lately speaks for itself”. Kyle Busch added that “normally that starts before Homestead (Miami Speedway), not before Chicago, but he can have his fun.”
However, the organization does recognize there could be warrant to the comments, as Kenseth says he’s the only one who has won under the format, with this only being the second year for it.
“The only way he was going to make it to Homestead (Miami Speedway) was to win Phoenix (International Raceway) and obviously that’s a great track for him and he was able to win Phoenix and then the only way to assure himself a championship is to win Homestead and did that too,” Kenseth explained. “Nobody has ever had quite that pressure to win a championship – (Tony) Stewart and Carl (Edwards) kind of did, they ran one-two and whoever won was going to win it, so that was kind of the same thing – but to able to do that in this format, to be behind and step up to the plate, absolutely, I think that gives him an advantage.”
Harvick will start the Chase with the upper-hand, though, as he will start on pole for the first race of the Chase virtue of qualifying being rained out and topping the charts.
