Sitting on the pit wall in front of his team’s pit box after the race concluded, an exhausted Kevin Harvick was asked to run through the final lap of the second stage, considering teammate Kurt Busch wasn’t thrilled with how he went about it.
“I don’t know why we’d have a conversation (about it). Maybe you can tell me that,” Harvick said to Dave Burns of NBC. “I thought it was a good race there, and (we) got a stage point.”
In the closing laps of the second stage, Harvick ran down Busch and squeezed his way through, almost touching the wall exiting Turn 4 in the process, to collect the playoff point that went with winning the stage. Busch didn’t take kindly to Harvick risking both their runs to collect a single point.
“Championship. What the…I mean really?! That’s a teammate right there, everybody. Tune it into NBC live. That’s what a teammate does. Never expected that from a teammate. Never expected it, wow!”
It was the highlight of a strong run in the Overton’s 400 at Chicagoland Speedway for Harvick, who finished fifth in the first stage while dealing with a tight handling car early in it, and first in the second.
While he reeled in race leader Kyle Busch with roughly 40 laps to go, the handling of his car went back towards the tight side and couldn’t make the pass on Busch. A few laps later, Kyle Larson usurped him for second and he brought his car home to a third-place finish.
SEE ALSO: Busch out-duels Larson on final lap at Chicagoland
“Our car was just off all weekend. We had a tough time making the front end turn, and then we would wind up way too tight all the way through the corner or way too loose all the way through the corner. The guys did a good job and kept us in the game all day. We had a chance, we just wound up at the wrong side of it at the end.”
He led 39 of the 267 laps and earned 50 points.
Harvick leaves Chicagoland Speedway second in points, 61 behind Kyle Busch.
