Birth Date: December 8, 1975 Hometown:
Team:
The beat goes on for Kevin Harvick.
Four more wins in 2019, third in points and 26 top 10s. Harvick has become
the model of consistency over his career.
Tell him he can’t win and expect to nd him in Victory Lane.
Few, if any, in the garage area are more willing to prove his critics wrong.
The same goes for his Stewart-Haas Racing team and their new eet of
Ford Mustangs.
Harvick achieved a career high in wins in 2018, and he slipped from that
number some in 2019, but he ultimately nished third in the points standings
for the third consecutive season, despite a few mistakes from the pit crew.
2020 will answer some lingering questions about how much longer can
Harvick race and live up to the high bar he has set for himself. More
importantly, it might answer if there is a second Cup Championship in his
Busch Light suit.
At Charlotte Roval, Harvick provided some reworks along with Chase
Elliott, racing hard into the nal ten laps. Elliott rallied past Harvick with six
laps to go and ultimately stole the win.
Harvick also races to win. Period. Eight victories in 2018 tied Kyle Busch for
the most in the NASCAR Cup Series. His 23 top-ve nishes and 29 top-
10s, along with a fth-place nish at Phoenix, were enough to get Harvick to
the nal round on points of the NASCAR Playoffs.
While he nished third at Homestead and in the nal point standings
Harvick again found the resolve to race through the controversy
and distractions.
“For me, there’s always some incentive in proving to people that you can do
something that isn’t what they think you should do,” he said after nishing in
the top-three in the Championship standings for the fth time in the last six
year. “You can look at my whole career. You shouldn’t win. You couldn’t win.
Then you did.
“It’s just the mentality of the race team. It always pushes the limits. When they
back you against the wall, make it better than it was before. You keep yourself
in the game. Sometimes, you know situations get that adrenaline going.”
Harvick is now up to 49 wins in his Cup Series career. A late win at Texas
in 2019 put Harvick in his fourth Championship 4 in the last six years. Even
after going winless in the rst 19 races, Harvick turned up his preparation to
another level — meaning 2019 became another more-than-solid year in a
long career.
A lot of his toughness was learned as a high school wrestler in Bakerseld, CA.
“Still go back to the best four years of my life were spent in the wrestling
room, learning about yourself, the things that you do,” Harvick said. “And
growing up in Bakerseld, it was a racing town.”
The racer from Bakerseld, CA, started quickly by winning three of the
rst four race at Atlanta, Las Vegas and Phoenix in 2018 — an opposite of
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his 19-race winless start to this past season. He came back in May to
win consecutive races at Dover and Kansas. He nishes with victories
at Loudon, Michigan and, of course, at Texas that created some
controversy for the nal two racing weekends.
Of course, the reason Harvick doesn’t crack under pressure is the fact he
has the genuine talent and the considerable resources of Stewart-Haas
Racing. That’s a one-two punch that makes his No. 4 Busch Beer/Jimmy
John’s Ford difcult to beat. Add that to the fact co-owner Tony Stewart
has three Cup Series Championships himself, including one at SHR.
As an organization, SHR has 51 combined victories and two
Championships since Stewart and Gene Haas created the team in
2009. And with 34 of those victories, Harvick has been the cornerstone
of the team’s success, qualifying for the Playoffs in each of the past
ve seasons.
“Racing is a lot like other sports and you go through spells of
capitalizing on things and having good cars and mediocre cars and
circumstances and part of this sport is that streaks come and go,”
Harvick told the Boston Herald before the 2019 race at New Hampshire.
Harvick was thrust into the limelight when he was the rst driver picked
to replace Dale Earnhardt following his death in 2001. With just one
season in the NASCAR xnity Series as experience, he still managed to
nish ninth in the Cup Series points despite missing one race.
He had 10 top-ve Championship nishes since.
Rodney Childers has been Harvick’s crew chief since the two made the
move to SHR Childers from the defunct Michael Waltrip Racing and
Harvick from Richard Childress Racing.
Childers calls his driver “laser-focused” and says, “his tool is the race
car. If we don’t give him good tools to work with, he’s not going to do a
good job.”
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KEVIN HARVICK
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