Kevin Harvick, Clint Bowyer Swap Pit Crews To Aid Richard Childress Racing Championship Hopes

Kevin Harvick, sitting third in the championship points with five races remaining, has found a solution to his struggles on pit road: Get a new pit crew.

Harvick has had numerous problems on pit road this season and has been heard berating his crew for what he believed were costly mistakes.

So this week, Richard Childress Racing came up with a solution: Swap the entire pit crews between the Nos. 29 (Harvick) and 33 (Clint Bowyer).

After all, Bowyer is out of Chase contention. So while Bowyer gets a lesser pit crew for the remainder of the season, Harvick gets an upgrade at a much-needed time.

“There is no question that my team is arguably the best team at RCR,” Bowyer said. “They’ve been together the longest. With us being out of the championship deal, Kevin is the last shot at RCR at basically bringing a championship home. We owe it to everybody involved – all the employees – to try to bring that championship back home.”

Bowyer said he personally went to the RCR shop on Tuesday to inform his crew of the news – he wanted it to come from his mouth, even though it wasn’t his decision.

“Certainly I’m going to miss them,” he said. “I think we can win with (Harvick’s) pit crew as well. There is certainly no slouch with what he had, and if he needed my crew to be better, I was going to give it to him. I owe it to him as a teammate.”

The pit crew will return to Bowyer if Harvick falls out of championship contention, he said. Some of the crew also work on and build Bowyer’s cars during the week, so there will be a reunion at some point.

Harvick was more tight-lipped on the change.

“Those (pit road) issues have been addressed and I believe everything will be fine this week,” he said. “Richard (Childress) made some huge changes this week.”

Jeff Burton, Bowyer and Harvick’s other RCR teammate, said the pit stops for the 31 and 29 teams have “been a weak point” this season.

“There’s been a tremendous effort to address it, to get it working better,” Burton said. “I know that as we entered the Chase, there was a tremendous effort to take the next step again and for neither team, the results weren’t there.

“Richard indicated to us a couple of weeks ago that as the Chase continued, and if we had one team that was still available...there had to be something done about shoring that problem up because it was really affecting us in a negative way.”

Burton said he was OK with the mentality of building one team up as an “A team” as long as it was “on a very, very temporary basis.” He said he would not support having one team get resources over another for the long term.

“It is kind of a sign of ‘OK, we’ve done everything else we know to do, this is all we got,’” Burton said. “I don’t want to say it is a sign of weakness, but it is a sign of saying we have no choice.”