Kevin Harvick says he heard enough from the NASCAR Cup Series race at Talladega Superspeedway earlier in the month to know that Jim Pohlman and Kyle Busch was not going to work out.
And to wit, despite scoring the first top-10 of the season together at Talladega on Sunday, Richard Childress Racing made a crew chief swap for the two-time Cup Series champion this week with Andy Street returning to the pit box.
Street served in that role last year, albeit in an interim capacity, once Randall Burnett announced he would leave the No. 8 car to take a job at Trackhouse Racing to work with rookie Connor Zilisch. Together, they scored two top-10s last year in five races to close out the season so Richard Childress Racing has just decided to run that back for the rest of this season.
This seemed inevitable after a series of radio transmissions that included spotter Derek Kneeland and Pohlman was made public after the race at Bristol.
"What is the frickin' problem now? Is the thing sideways or is it plowing? What the fuck does it look like!?"
"It’s still not getting into the corner."
"Why? I don't get it! We tighten it up and why can't it get in the fuckin' corner!?"
"I don't know. I've got a headset on, not a helmet. I don't, I don't know."
"We keep tightening it up and we keep going slower!"
"I know you're frustrated. Us yelling at each other during the race isn't going to help. ... We're in this together."
"It's the same shit every week."
Harvick spent the first half of his career with Richard Childress Racing and he saw the figurative writing on the wall.
“Here’s the problem I saw with this scenario: Jim Pohlman’s just like Kyle Busch,” Harvick said on his Happy Hour weekly show on FOX Sports’ YouTube channel. “Very vocal, very rough and tumble, fiery. It never sounded like it was going to work. And we talked about this somewhere, I don’t know where, but Richard Childress not being afraid to pull the trigger when he needs to make changes.”
And it’s a change he would have advocated for too.
“It was just a really, really, really combative scenario that you had with those two personalities of Jim Pohlman and Kyle Busch in the car,” Harvick said. “If I had a crew chief that talked about me like that, I would fire his ass quickly because that is unacceptable. They can be mad at me, but talking like they talked on that channel two after Bristol that week, that was unacceptable. That is the wrong guy.”
Street has worked as an engineer, O’Reilly and Cup Series crew chief and Harvick says RCR just has to keep trying things.
“At some point, you have to put the whole company in a better scenario so that the 3 car runs better, so that Kyle runs better,” Harvick said. “Got their first top 10 of the year for RCR this weekend at Talladega, finished 10th. That’s the best finish of the year for either of those cars. I think that Andy Street, he was at RCR when I was at RCR. Very mild-mannered, been around for a long time. We’ve seen him on those O’Reilly Series cars in the past.”
Harvick also believes his fellow championship winning driver can still get it done if given the cars to do it.
“Here we are just after Talladega, what, 11 weeks in or so?” Harvick said. “Pulling the trigger on making that change right now to see if there is life in that situation to get Kyle back on track, I think Richard believes that Kyle Busch can get it done behind the wheel; it’s just a matter of putting him in the right scenario.”
