SHR's Zipadelli: "We have to do something" about Harvick's pit crew

“We had control of the race. We were absolutely pile-driving them all night and then we gave it away,” Harvick said immediately after the race, in which he led 214 of the 367 laps but finished runner-up to Martin Truex Jr.

“The team in the garage did a great job. They brought the fastest race car to the track once again. We just didn’t do a good job on pit road. We gave it away.”

Following Sunday night’s Southern 500 at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway, Harvick’s crew chief, Rodney Childers, declined to comment on the team’s performance, which included an air gun miscue and a loss of 17 net spots on pit road.

A frustrating situation

And Greg Zipadelli, Stewart-Haas Racing’s director of competition, said he was “pulling his hair out” trying to find a solution to the team’s problems.

“I feel bad. We’ve changed people there. They’ll have a good week. They’ll have a bad stop and come back and have a good stop. The one deal that really got them behind tonight is something happened with the (air) gun,” Zipadelli said.

“I don’t know that I can blame them. The bottom line is the guy sitting in the seat – he doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter to anybody why it happens, just that it happened. If something is going to happen, it’s going to happen to them, let’s put it that way.

“Right now it’s pretty frustrating. I feel we have a lot of resources and we’ve moved people around, like I said. Some days you feel like it’s helping and other days you have a day like today.”

Zipadelli said there is something to say about trying to maintain chemistry on a team, but pit crew members these days have to understand they “got to do their job.”

“There is something to them working together but I think there is something more in everybody believing in each other and leaving the egos and all the bullshit at the house and coming here and work together as a team,” he said.

“Here tonight they had really solid stops the first half of the race, did everything they needed to do and then the gun breaks and everybody tries to make up for everything. You rush to try to go hard and it doesn’t work.

“It stinks when you have a car that good and a driver who drives his guts out and we let him down. If it was a single thing, it would be easier to fix. We have to do something.”

Their options

Since three of the four SHR teams (Harvick, Tony Stewart and Kurt Busch) have all qualified for the Chase, SHR’s options to change going forward may be limited to moving crew members off Danica Patrick’s team.

“We’ve got people. We’ll just have to look at it. The gun breaking or whatever happened there certainly wasn’t the tire changer. There are other issues, I guess is what I’m alluding to without getting into detail.”