Kevin Harvick topped the NASCAR Cup Series with a career-best nine victories last year. With that total, the driver of the No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford vaulted past Kyle Busch as the active leader in Cup wins with 58.
Despite winning the regular-season title, however, Harvick failed to make the Championship 4 for only the second time since the introduction of the current elimination Playoff format in 2014. As the 2021 season approaches, Harvick won’t be thinking about what went wrong last year.
“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,” Harvick said. “In this business, you just don’t have time to dwell on it. If you’re going to 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 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… They (Harvick’s team members) 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.”
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.
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