updated 11:26 p.m. ET Sept. 8, 2006

RICHMOND, Va. - Kevin Harvick’s dominance in NASCAR’s Busch Series has been so pronounced all season that even his racing competitors are starting to concede.

“They ought to just give him the trophy now,” Greg Biffle said Friday night after Harvick won for the sixth time this season and the third straight time at Richmond.

Harvick led five times for 154 laps and will leave Richmond International Raceway with a 619-point lead over Carl Edwards and just seven races left on the schedule.

The lead is three more than the biggest season-ending point margin in series history, achieved when Jeff Green won the 2000 title by 616 points over Jason Keller.

That means Harvick could skip three of the races entirely and still have the lead, but the 2001 series champion said he’s not looking for a reason to let up at all.

“I want to close out the year as we’ve run the rest of the year,” he said.

In a word, that has been dominating.

The victory in the Emerson 250 was the 23rd of Harvick’s Busch career, fourth all-time, and the fourth of his career on the .75-mile, D-shaped oval. It also gave him 25 top-10 finishes in 28 Busch races this season — almost unprecedented consistency.

“It’s just been one of those years when everything has gone right,” he said.

Harvick has led the points race since the second race of the season.

He went ahead to stay when he passed Scott Wimmer with 59 laps to go, but in a race filled with fits and starts because of a record-tying 14 cautions, he never needed long to show that his car was still the class of the field. The cautions consumed 66 laps.

Biffle finished second, .925 seconds behind, and Matt Kenseth was third.

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The race was a good start to the weekend for Harvick, who is third in the Nextel Cup standings and needs to finish just 40th in Saturday night’s Chevy Rock & Roll 400 to clinch a spot in the 10-race Chase for the championship, which begins next week.

Afterward, Harvick had bad news for the rest of his Nextel Cup drivers.

“I really feel like our Cup car was quite a bit better than our Busch car in practice,” he said. His Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet will start fifth Saturday.

The start was more ominous for teammate Jeff Burton, who quit after 124 laps when his brakes went, and had to be hoping the bad luck won’t carry over to Saturday.

Burton will start the Chevy 400 on the outside of the front row, but he’s 10th in points and just 30 ahead of Kasey Kahne, who needs to leapfrog one driver to earn a spot in the Chase. Kahne is the only driver outside the top 10 with a chance.

Paul Menard was fourth Friday night, tops among series regulars, and Reed Sorensen was fifth.

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