Kevin Harvick comes up one spot short in quest to repeat as Sprint Cup champion
Coming into Sunday night's winner-take-all championship race at Homestead-Miami Speedway, Kevin Harvick was almost universally regarded as the favorite to end up on top.
As arguably the most dominant driver throughout the 2015 Sprint Cup season and as the only one among Sunday's four contenders who had previously been part of a Championship 4 battle, Harvick seemed to have every practical advantage over his competition.
But unfortunately for the Stewart-Haas Racing driver, Kyle Busch had other plans.
With Busch and Harvick clearly boasting the best cars among the four championship finalists, Busch was sailing toward a commanding victory when a late caution flag waved for debris, setting up a final restart with eight laps to go and breathing life into Harvick's fading hopes of a second consecutive championship.
Lining up fourth on the restart, Harvick made fairly quick work of Brad Keselowski and Kyle Larson, but was unable to chase down Busch, who crossed the finish line 1.552 seconds ahead of Harvick's No. 4 Chevrolet.
In the end, Harvick blamed his failure to repeat on simply not having enough speed to run with Busch's No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota on Sunday night.
"I kept looking in the mirror, and I'm like, 'Man, my car just doesn't absolutely feel great at all,' and I never saw anybody in the mirror," Harvick said. "So it was a handful and sliding all over the place. I think it says a lot about our team and the fact that they kept fighting. Our guys on pit road did a great job all night. We were able to maintain or gain track position all night long."
Harvick led 46 laps -- five more than Busch -- but Busch spent the latter stages of the race well ahead of Harvick, even when they weren't the frontrunners.
"Our car fired off good," Harvick said. "We were able to go through traffic good at the beginning, but as the night went, it seemed like the 18 (Busch) got better, and we just got ... we didn't get any better. We just stayed the same and never could fix the problems that we had."
Harvick's crew chief, Rodney Childers, made no excuses for coming up short.
"We just didn't hit it perfect tonight," last year's championship-winning crew chief told FOXSports.com moments after the race while standing in the Homestead garage. "To win these deals you've got to hit it perfect. Some of our changes for the race might have hurt instead of helped, but you've got to try, and if you feel like you're not quite as good as those guys on Saturday afternoon, you've got to at least go for it, and that's what we did."
Harvick's team owner, Gene Haas, might have best summarized the team's disappointment about coming so close to backing up its title from a year ago.
"That was an incredible high, and I think we thought we were going to repeat it, and we didn't, and that's an incredible low," Haas said.
Harvick placed high praise on Busch, a driver with whom he has clashed in the past but has come to respect -- especially since Busch became a father to son Brexton back in May.
"I think as you go through time in general, as a person, you mature and you get more mature through time, whether you're doing dumb things at the racetrack or not and learning from those things," Harvick said. "Those obviously are unfortunately part of our life lessons, some more than others, and I think Kyle and I have definitely been on that side of it.
"I think you see that little guy that he holds in his arms, and you know, it puts things in a different perspective. It used to be you didn't want to have kids because it took the fire out of you from driving the car, and now it seems to have calmed a lot of us down to the point where we can focus and do the things that we need to do to concentrate on our jobs."
