Photo – Robert Reiners/Getty Images
Being a defending Sprint Cup Series champion is never easy.
Once a driver becomes champion, they have a huge target on their back. The wins are harder to come by when the new season begins, and the same strategy from last year doesn’t work this year.
For Kevin Harvick in the 2015 season, he easily could have had more wins. Not because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but because he finished second more times than any driver last season. And that is just not rewarding enough. Harvick has 12 second place finishes against three wins and that doesn’t seem to sit well for Harvick as he heads into this season.
No doubt he had all the tools he needed at Stewart Haas Racing, which it seems was a deficit at Richard Childress Racing. Harvick led more laps in his first two years at Stewart-Haas Racing compared to the years he spent at RCR. Winning eight poles in his first year at SHR is also a career best. Another career best of 23 top-five finishes should have been enough to help Harvick win his second straight Sprint Cup championship. At this point, it seems that consistency isn’t enough to win a title.
It’s easy to say that Harvick could easily have won 15 races last season. The last driver with ten or more wins in a season was Jimmie Johnson in 2007, when he won his second straight Sprint Cup championship. Saying there’s no doubt that Harvick could easily have had the championship handed to him, is simple. But there were some obstacles that held Harvick back from winning so many races. One obstacle was the return of Kyle Busch, another was the sudden resurgence of Joe Gibbs Racing.
After Busch came back from his gruesome XFINITY Series wreck at Daytona International Speedway early in the season and missing 11 Sprint Cup Series races, he ran off four wins in five races. Busch then held off Harvick to not only win the race at Homestead, but his first Sprint Cup title as well. After his return, the entire JGR team caught fire and never looked back for the rest of the season.
Perhaps Harvick and his SHR team need to catch a new kind of fire to capture more wins in 2016. Here’s hoping Harvick has found that new fire that will delight his fans this season.
More than ever, Harvick needs more wins to regain the Sprint Cup title in 2016.
It doesn’t matter how many wins a driver has once by they make it to homestead, harvick could have had ten wins but finishing second at homestead to Busch means second in points. It’s a ridiculous points systems. What happened to a season champion not a champion of ten races. Don’t forget how joey easily on his way to a fourth straight win would have had something to say at homestead like keselowski did leading a lot of the late race if he only could have hung on for four more laps at Texas pense would have had both drivers going for the championship. Still though whoever finishes higher at homestead out of the four fighting for the championship wins the championship. One race to decide a season for four is stupid. Nascar has lost its roots and its true fans to this circus show on Sundays. It still beats the nfl though and any other sport but there needs to be consistency throughout the years of the same rules and season points format. Since 2001 I’ve seen it go from the Winston cup to Nextel, to Nextel Sprint to Sprint. Plus a 36 race championship points driver to the chase of 10, then 12,13, now 16 ands it’s elimination style. We aren’t competing against other sports so why are we using there systems, nascar is nascar, you either watch it or you don’t, on Sundays and some Saturday nights if you’re a fan it’s on your tv or radio. Nascar needs to go back to the real days of nascar right about 2003. And bring back those shorter but awesome tracks, not enough room for as many fans as you want? Too bad at least it would be a sellout race.