Winning is never mundane for a Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series driver, but it’s starting to look that way for Kevin Harvick.
After winning Saturday night’s All-Star Race, Harvick walked into the media center at Charlotte Motor Speedway notably subdued, which prompted a question regarding his seeming lack of enthusiasm.
“I got a 4-month old baby at home,” he said. “I showed up this morning. I held my little girl at, I don’t know, 7:30, 8 a.m. I drove to the race track. I practiced. I went back, watched my son’s baseball game. I drove back for the drivers meeting. I had four appearances. I sat and laid on the couch for an hour, watched the race. Then I came back out and did driver intros, ran the race.
“If your ass wouldn’t be tired by now, I don’t know who you are. But I’m beat. I felt like I gave it a full effort today. If I’m subdued, I’m sorry. I’m really happy that we won the race. I’m really excited for my team and organization and sponsors and everybody. But I’m tired. Got to remember, I’m old. When I leave here, I’m going to go home, I drink too many more of these Busch beers, I might be asleep in the car.”
Before he hauled his tired butt into the media center, Harvick did something no one thought possible in 2018. He drove away from the field in the All-Star Race with a new rules package that was supposed to keep that from happening.
In a race marked by a substantial amount of passing throughout the field, Harvick took the lead from Ricky Stenhouse Jr. on Lap 6 and built a sizable lead in the first of four stages.
After losing positions during the pit stop at the end of the first stage, Harvick had to fight his way through traffic and did not regain the lead until near the end of the third stage.
“Hey, everything’s going our way,” Harvick said. “We have really fast cars. Everybody is executing. The pit crew didn’t have a great first stop with the tire getting hung in the fender, but they rebounded with a great pit stop on the next stop and gained a spot or two there. That’s what you want out of an experienced team, whether it’s the pit crew, the crew chief, the driver. When something goes wrong, you got to be able to overcome it, refocus, move forward.”
It was Harvick’s sixth win of the year, and although it was a non-points event, it marks the second time this season that he has won three consecutive races – putting another stamp on his claim to be the most dominant driver on a weekly basis.
The trick to success is not to allow winning to become mundane – no matter how it looks to the competition or the fans.
“It’s racing like you’re losing,” Harvick said after winning his second career All-Star Race. “If you can trick yourself into doing that every week, not get too high during the highs, really feel like you need to keep pushing to make things better, that’s really the mindset that everybody has right now.”
It might be easy to dismiss his current string of success in the belief that Harvick, crew chief Rodney Childers and the No. 4 team have found something through the first 12 races of 2018 that everyone else is missing. And while that may be partially true in terms of his success in points paying races, that element was missing from his All-Star victory.
The commonality between Harvick’s win Saturday night and the five points victories so far this year is the dedication and experience of the team – something that predates 2018.
“I don’t feel like that’s really a different position than we’ve been in four out of the five last years,” Harvick said. “Last year was obviously a building year for us. I think that’s the one thing that is the great part about this team, is we’ve been in a position to obviously win the championship in 2014. ’15 had a great year, won a bunch of races. We’ve been in position to have been successful before. I think that the experience of the team and the organization and all the racers that come into that shop day after day kind of sets the tone of the expectations, but also having been in a lot of these situations before with each other.
“I’m proud of them all. That to me is more important than the money and everything that comes with it because everybody puts so much time with it. There’s nothing better than seeing them all high-five in Victory Lane.”
Two weeks after taking home one of NASCAR’s most distinctive trophies – a concrete Miles the Monster holding a diecast replica of the No. 4 car for is AAA 400 win – Harvick was excited to give his son Keelan another piece of art for his playroom.
“Man, I like the trophy, to tell you the truth. I’ll take the money, for sure. All the kids think it’s Lightning McQueen’s Piston Cup. I’m sure that’s (what) mine will think about it when he wakes up and sees it in the morning.”
Harvick’s son was impressed, but he is beginning to reassess his priorities. After waking up the morning after Kevin’s $1 million win, Keelan said “cool trophy where’s the money?”
