Kevin Harvick - experience helps keep the No. 4 team competitive

credit: Lisa Janine Cloud/Skirts and Scuffs 

by Lisa Janine Cloud

Just a month shy of his 44th birthday, Kevin Harvick has been racing in the upper tiers of NASCAR almost half his life. With 48 career Cup wins, the Bakersfield, California native sits at 16th on the all-time wins list, tied with NASCAR Hall of Famer Herb Thomas.  Ahead of him, only active drivers Jimmie Johnson and Kyle Busch are not members of the Hall of Fame. (Yet. Both those drivers are shoo-ins when they become eligible.) With 47 Xfinity Series wins and two championships, 14 Gander Outdoor Truck Series wins as a driver and two Truck championships as an owner, as well as a K & N West championship, Harvick should also be an automatic lock for the NHOF.

Since moving from Richard Childress Racing to Stewart Haas Racing in 2014, Harvick has made it to the Final Four five out of six seasons and is poised to make it again this season if the next two races go as he hopes.

When asked to compare this season with those previous ones, which include his championship season, Harvick said, “We have done nothing but shoot ourselves in the foot the last few weeks. We started last at Kansas and crashed at Talladega and I don't know what we did last week, I guess it was just typical Martinsville. I feel like we probably had top five cars in those three weeks at the end of the race and didn’t have that solid execution finish in front of where you probably should have.”

But that championship experience gives Harvick and his team a performance edge, if not necessarily the speed they’d like to have. “I think the experience of the number 4 team and the execution and the things that we have done have definitely made the most out of what we have had as an organization.”

He went on to explain, “I think as an organization we haven’t been as consistent with the speed as we would like to be and it is difficult. We started behind, guessed the wrong direction, migrated back to the same direction - we have been in a number of different directions and still not 100-percent sure every week of where we need to be with all the different things you can do to the car from an aero side of things. It has definitely been a fight every single week in order to get the finishes that we have had and keep ourselves in contention.

“I think for us the experience and the continuity of the race team and the experience of being around each other has allowed us to get the most out of everything that we’ve got.”