NASCAR Cup Series

Peacemaker? Harvick finishes second, tells BK 'to fight his own fight'

Published Nov. 2, 2014 10:53 p.m. ET

foxsports

After a rough outing last weekend at Martinsville Speedway, Stewart-Haas Racing's Kevin Harvick went into Sunday's race at Texas Motor Speedway in need of a victory.

Unfortunately for the driver of the No. 4 Chevrolet, he came up one spot short, finishing second to race winner Jimmie Johnson.

Entering the day 33 points out of the Chase lead, Harvick was able to close the gap to 18 points, but remains last among the eight Chase drivers heading into next weekend's Chase elimination race at Phoenix International Raceway.

A top-five car for much of the race, Harvick was in the mix in the closing laps as he battled for the race lead with Jimmie Johnson and Brad Keselowski on the second and final green-white-checkered restart.

While Johnson got the advantage and ultimately drove away with the victory, Harvick was able to slide under Keselowski for the second spot.

"You just hoped you were good on restarts and you could hold your own," said Harvick. "Everybody was digging for everything they could. (It) obviously got to be nighttime as well. As it gets closer to the end, the intensity ratchets up. At this point in the year, everybody's just going for broke trying to win a race, get the best finish they can to end the season on a good note. It's hard racing. It's fun."

The outing was much more fun than last week's race at Martinsville, where an ill-timed wheel-hop by Matt Kenseth sent Harvick's No. 4 Chevrolet hard into the outside wall and resulted in a 33rd-place finish.

Throughout both Saturday's Nationwide Series and Sunday's Sprint Cup Series races, Harvick raced Kenseth hard and rarely gave him room, but the two veteran drivers kept it clean. Despite racing around each other much of the day, Harvick said retaliation never really came to mind.

"I just raced," he said. "I thought my car was fast enough to win the race and be in contention. Doing something crazy at that point in the race, then I never saw him toward the end of the race, so it wasn't really our game plan to get into that situation any further than we needed to.

"It's like I said before the race, I know he didn't do it on purpose, but in the end we still lost 33 points to the leader. We got to race as hard as we can to try to get it back."

Harvick was certainly racing hard in the closing laps, but was not willing to put his car in the situation Keselowski did with Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson on the first attempt at a green-white-checkered finish.

"I couldn't run over the 24 or the 48 like that," he said.

That situation led to a major post-race scuffle between Gordon, Keselowski and their respective crews, something Harvick had a small part of when he pushed Keselowski back into the mix.

"I didn't get in the middle of anything," he said. "I just turned him around and told him to go fight his own fight."

Now 13 points out of the Chase lead, Harvick heads to next week's elimination race at Phoenix International Raceway in a better spot than he when he left Martinsville, but it is still not ideal. Despite the 13-point gap, Harvick remains eighth among the eight Chase contenders, but also dominated the March race there, leading 224 of the 312 laps.

As this Chase format has shown, anything can certainly happen during next week's race, and while Harvick and his Rodney Childers-led team have been one of the best teams consistently throughout the year, there is no guarantee they will have a shot at the title at Homestead-Miami Speedway -- unless they go out and win next week in Phoenix.

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