Kevin Harvick offers pointed advice to Brad Keselowski after Pocono penalty

At Pocono, Brad Keselowski had a fast car and he was putting himself into some good positions in the race. But a few key mistakes proved costly.

Keselowski entered pit road when it was closed, triggering one penalty after his team missed the boat entirely on his attempted stop. Then, a bad strategy call on the part of Keselowski proved costly late in the race.

The gaffes were bad enough that Kevin Harvick weighed in on them on the Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour podcast. He began with the entry onto a closed pit road.

“To me, this is just a failure on everybody’s part,” Harvick said. “I mean, you can blame it on the spotter, you can blame it on the driver, you can blame it on the crew chief. Whoever you want to blame it on, just take your choice.”

But even after the penalty for entering a closed pit road, Keselowski was able to make up some positions. He was near the lead in the race late in the process, but he tried to stretch his fuel window a bit longer.

Rather than come in when his pit crew advised him to, Keselowski stayed out on the track. He thought he could make it another lap or two before coming in, giving him an advantage later in the race.

Instead, a caution came out for a spin from Shane Van Gisbergen. Brad Keselowski lost his edge.

“I think this is, and I’ve had to learn this lesson and go down this road before too, when you want to become overly involved from the driver’s seat into the strategy and you don’t know all the calculations and numbers… yeah, I think that’s an error on Brad’s part to get involved in that,” Harvick said. “It definitely hurt them in this particular situation. But as I went through the last 10 years of my career, I never got involved in the strategy at all. Don’t have the computers, don’t have anything to go along with what is happening.”

For Keselowski, things are a little different. There’s a different dynamic at play for him than for some other drivers.

“That’s a tough scenario when you have the driver and the owner driving the car, but in the end it took him out of contention this week,” Harvick said. “So you never know how they’ll take it from here.”

Harvick made one last plea to Keselowski to trust his crew to do their jobs. He thinks there’s just a generational gap there, but the way he sees it, there’s really only one way to go about it.

“I think this is where, when you talk about my generation of guys, and you say ‘OK, what has changed with how today’s NASCAR world works?'” Harvick said. “Driver needs to butt out. Driver needs to butt out of the strategy. Once you buckle into the car, you’re the driver if you want to get the most success out of it, in my opinion.”