February 5, 2021 | By Lee Spencer

No looking back for Kevin Harvick

Kevin Harvick raised the bar in 2020 with a career-best nine-win season. 

His nine victories, 20 top fives and 27 top 10s led each of those categories on the NASCAR Cup tour. 

Still, at the end of 35 races, the best Harvick could hope for was fifth in the standings after he failed to advance to the Championship 4. Even after winning the regular-season title—and the 15 bonus points that came with the honor—Harvick fell short of vying for the Cup. 

For a driver intent on winning races, that’s what mattered most in the end.

“My focus is always on week to week winning races,” Harvick said. “In the end it didn’t really matter. We ran terrible at Phoenix, so it’s not like you were going to win the championship anyway. It didn’t really matter as we got to Phoenix and with the way that we ran.  

“I think you look back on it and you take the things that you did at each one of those race tracks and you try to make them better because that’s really what it’s all about is, ‘How do I stay focused on a week to week basis? What did we do last year at this particular racetrack? What did we do good? What did we do bad? Show me the strengths. Show me the weaknesses.  Show me where we beat them. Show me where we were getting beat.’  

“And it’s the same preparation over and over and over, and the whole championship layout is something that is what it is, but it changes zero in your preparation. It really doesn’t change a thing.”

For Harvick, trophies matter most. That strategy has paid off. Harvick now leads all current drivers with 58 wins—one more than Kyle Busch. He has amassed 35 victories since joining Stewart-Haas Racing in 2014. After last year’s nine-win run, the 2014 Cup champion vaulted to ninth on the all-time win list.

“You go to the race track and, for me, I’m not going to go to the racetrack and points race,” Harvick said. “We’re going to go to the racetrack and try to put ourselves in position to win the race and then the second thing when you can’t do that is gain the most points that you can on that particular day and you go home.  

“It’s just not something that I overthink. It’s not something that really gets me up or down, winning or losing. It doesn’t. It doesn’t really affect how I prepare on Monday. We can finish dead last or we can finish first and I’m gonna do the exact same thing when it comes to Monday morning. That part doesn’t change for me.”

At 45, don’t expect the driver of the No. 4 SHR Ford to focus on failures. Since NASCAR changed the points system in 2014, Harvick has qualified for the final four in all but two seasons—2016 and last year. He and Kyle Busch are the only two Cup drivers to accomplish that feat. 

Harvick shifted his focus to 2021 not long after the checkers flew at Phoenix Raceway—and he expects his team members to follow his lead.

“If they haven’t, I don’t want to talk about it,” Harvick said. “I think as the season ended and we got about a week through it I was done and over with it and had a lot to do moving forward. In this business, you just don’t have time to dwell on it.  If you’re gonna continue to be good at what you do, you have to be able to put your mind back to work and take the things that went wrong and make them better, re-focus and you have to use those things as motivation in order to make those particular things better.  

“I think those guys know that. I feel like I’m wasting my breath talking about everything that happened last year because we’ve talked about what went wrong and I’ve moved on and tried to be ready for this particular season—to do the things that you need to do in order to get the season started right and be competitive on a week to week basis. They know that I’ll get pretty frustrated if they want to sit and dwell on what happened last year when we’re already into just over a week away from the Daytona 500. They better have moved on. If they haven’t, they don’t talk to me about it.”