Kevin Harvick backs Kyle Busch crew chief firing: ‘I would fire his ass quickly’

Richard Childress Racing has made a crew chief change for Kyle Busch, hoping to spark something for the No. 8 car after his best finish of the season at Talladega. In steps Andy Street; out goes Jim Pohlman.

Kevin Harvick weighed in on the move on the Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour podcast. And he felt it was way past time.

“Here’s the problem I saw with this scenario: Jim Pohlman’s just like Kyle Busch,” Harvick said. “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 to make changes.”

So the change has been made and now the question is whether Street can get things going. Pohlman certainly wasn’t having much luck in that regard, and Harvick further expanded on the butting of heads between him and Kyle Busch.

“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 2 after Bristol that week, that was unacceptable. That is the wrong guy.”

Still, Harvick isn’t entirely convinced that Kyle Busch’s problems will end simply because he’s made a crew chief change. The issues go much deeper than that.

The 60-time NASCAR Cup Series winner put the onus instead on the company. He explained.

“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,” he 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.”

Could that make the difference for Kyle Busch? We will see.

“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.”