Matt Kenseth’s opening victories in NASCAR’s first two races of the 2013 Chase for the Sprint Cup doesn’t alter the game plan for at least one of his rivals.
Indeed, Kevin Harvick said Tuesday that he and his Richard Childress Racing team may be powerless to stop the romp that Kenseth is on at the moment.
“If Matt keeps doing the things that he’s doing and winning every race, it’s going to be hard for anybody to make up points,” Harvick said in a teleconference. “For us we ran well at Chicago and overcame a lot of mistakes. Last week we weren’t able to overcome an ill-handling car and make something out of it.”
Harvick enters this weekend’s race at Dover sixth in points, 39 in arrears of Kenseth. He said the team can’t change the way it races purely based on Kenseth and Joe Gibbs Racing’s performance thus far.
“There is no different approach. You go out and run your car as fast as it’ll go and you try to put yourself in a position to win every week, and when you can’t win you try to take the best finish that you can out of every week,” he admitted.
“Everybody thinks that you change the way that you race; well, that’s really not possible because you have to race as hard as you can to get through the first 26 weeks and then you’ve got to do the same thing in the last 10. There’s no change of what you do.”
The change Harvick is avoiding thinking about – for the next eight weeks at least – is his pending switch to Stewart-Haas Racing for 2014. He did say he was thankful his sponsors, Budweiser and Jimmy John’s, will follow him over next year. It provides a level of continuity when there will be other changes for him to adjust to.
