Kevin Harvick's Greatest Moments in NASCAR

by Julian Spivey

Screenshot

​Kevin Harvick wraps up his 23-year no doubt first-ballot NASCAR Hall of Fame career this weekend in the Cup Series 2023 season finale at Phoenix Raceway, which happens to be the best track of his career statistically. Harvick’s done just about everything there is to do on the sport’s biggest stages from winning a championship to winning the sport’s crown jewels races like the Daytona 500, the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway three times, the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway twice and the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway twice. His 60 career Cup Series wins place him as the 10th most-winning driver in the sport’s 75-year history. As we say goodbye to Harvick’s racing career, though if you’re a fan know he won’t be gone long as he’ll immediately join the Fox Sports announcer’s booth at the beginning of next season, we look back on some of his greatest moments in NASCAR and since the car number he’s had the most career success in has been the No. 4 for Stewart-Haas Racing we’ve chosen his four greatest moments.

4. King of Phoenix
​
Anytime you can say you’re the winningest driver in a track’s history, especially if that track has been around as long as Phoenix Raceway, you’ve accomplished quite a feat. At one point not so long ago, you could pretty much pencil Harvick’s name in as Phoenix winner in the Cup Series. It was as sure as night becoming day. Harvick has won nine times at the track, which is once out of almost every four times he’s competed at the track throughout his 23-year career. His 1,596 laps led are the most at the track, as well as his 29 top-10s and 19 top-5s. He swept both races at the track in both 2006 and 2014, showing his dominance at the track had a long span.

3. Daytona 500 Victory

For most drivers, if there is one race they most want to win in their career it’s the Daytona 500, known as the Super Bowl of the sport. Kevin Harvick’s Daytona 500 win in 2007 was one of the most dramatic and closest in the history of the legendary race as he raced future NASCAR Hall of Famer Mark Martin, one of the greatest drivers to never win the sport’s biggest race, neck-and-neck to the finish line winning by .020 seconds, which at the time was the closest finish in the history of the race, as a massive wreck broke out in the pack behind him.

2. Championship

Kevin Harvick was always a good driver at Richard Childress Racing throughout the first half of his career compiling 25 wins in 13 seasons with the organization, including his Daytona 500 win. But he had never managed to finish higher than third in the championship point standings. As soon as he moved over to Stewart-Haas Racing in 2014 it’s like everything immediately clicked for him and he went from good (he was likely already going to be a Hall of Famer at that point) to great as he tied his career high in wins with five that season, won eight poles (which was more than his entire RCR career) and won his first and only championship in the very first year of the NASCAR playoff format that saw drivers eliminated after every three races and four drivers compete for it all in the final event of the season, which at the time was at Homestead-Miami Speedway where he won the race to clinch the title. He would go on to become the winningest driver in the sport over the next few seasons compiling multiple wins every season from 2014-2020, including eight in 2018 and a career-high nine in 2020 and he was doing all of this in his late-30s to his mid-40s. I don’t think any driver in the history of NASCAR has ever had as great of a back half of their career as Harvick.

1. First Win Helps Heal an Organization and Sport

Kevin Harvick was thrust into the NASCAR Cup Series earlier than expected and under the most tragic of circumstances. When Dale Earnhardt, a seven-time champion and one of the five greatest drivers in the history of the sport, died on the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500 car owner Richard Childress needed someone to pilot his team’s number one ride. The call went out to his Busch Series (now Xfinity Series) driver Harvick and the next week at Rockingham Speedway in North Carolina he was behind the wheel of the re-branded from No. 3 to No. 29 and re-painted racecar. What happened two weeks later at Atlanta Motor Speedway was a fairytale story that helped in at least a little way heal a hurting organization and sport when he piloted that car to Victory Lane in a tight, hard-fought battle with multiple time champion Jeff Gordon for his first career Cup Series win. It’s a moment nobody who watched the sport at that time will ever be able to forget. 

---