Harvick critical of RCR form

Harvick currently ranks in 25th place in the drivers' standings in what is turning out to be his worst ever season in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. Since finishing fourth at Atlanta in the fourth race of the year, he has failed to score another top-ten finish.

Following a couple of years when all three drivers from the team had been in contention for the title, this year none of them are currently in position to make the series' play-off with Clint Bowyer being the best ranked in 15th place.

Earlier this month Richard Childress issued a statement saying that Harvick is signed on a multi-year contract including 2010 after it was reported that the former Nationwide Series champion wanted to leave the team at the end of the season.

Although Harvick would not comment on his contractual situation with the team, speaking at Indianapolis he was vocal about his feelings on his team's poor form.

"As a team, we've been off in everything," Harvick said. "We started the year off, and once we started in California, we had one car that we felt like was competitive and the oil filter fell off of it and totaled it. Pretty much from that point, it's been struggles.

"The last four or five weeks, we've been an eighth to tenth-place car and just have had crazy things happen. It's just been one thing after another. But the performance has been fair the last four or five weeks."

Back in May, Harvick started working with a new crew headed by Gil Martin, following many years beside Todd Berrier, who was switched over to work alongside is team-mate Casey Mears.

Harvick said the change did not really have any effect in helping the team overcome the issues that have hampered their season.

"I don't think that the crew chiefs are necessarily the things that have been changed that have helped the performance of the cars come up over the last four or five weeks," Harvick said.

"Basically, what's changed is everything. Every body, every piece on the body, just about every piece of the car has been changed over the past four or five weeks.

"It's really a lot of unfair pressure that gets put on our crew chiefs. I don't think moving from one crew chief to another necessarily did anything other than make everybody realise that the problem lies somewhere else other than our crew chiefs."

Harvick expects to see an upturn in performance this weekend at Indianapolis, where he is racing with a completely new car, implementing some changes to try to overcome some of the problems that have kept them racing in the midfield recently.

"We brought a new car here and everything has gone well since we unloaded it," Harvick said. "Our focus is to do what we need to do on the race track and go from there. Everything has gone well this weekend, and we'll continue working at it and we'll go from there."

Harvick won the Daytona 500 in 2007 but he has not managed to win a race since then. This year he won the Budweiser Shootout and a week later he claimed his best result of the season to date with a second place finish at the season opener.