1. Maybe Kevin Harvick should reconsider retiring after next season
The NASCAR TV announcers, and particularly the FOX Sports crew that handles the first half of every season, love to remind us that among his handful of nicknames, Kevin Harvick is known as “The Closer.”
He earned that nickname for being the kind of performer who knows how to be at his best late in races, pouncing when it matters most to get victories. You’d hardly know it early this season, since Harvick, and really all of Stewart-Haas Racing, were non-factors most weeks.
But the Harvick and his No. 4 team have taken the idea of “finding something” to its logical extreme, winning back-to-back races at two very different kinds of tracks: Michigan and Richmond. To say it came out of nowhere is a bit of an understatement; along with since late in the 2020 season, Harvick’s previous two finishes before the victories were 27th and 33rd.
Before these wins, Harvick seemed a bit like late-career Jimmie Johnson, looking like he just lost the plot. Maybe the Next Gen car didn’t suit his driving style (though to be fair, his winless streak pre-dated the new vehicle) and he was just going to be competing for top 10s until he retired next year.
But all of a sudden, Harvick is a championship contender by virtue of those two victories (we’ll get back to that shortly). Which begs the question: Should Harvick reconsider calling it a career after 2023?
If he has his mind made up that his heart simply isn’t in for the weekly grind, then that’s something of a rhetorical question. The fact of the matter is that he’s proven he isn’t just running laps, but still very much in the hunt for more victories, and perhaps, even more championships.
In other words, he’s looking a bit more late-career Mark Martin than JJ. That’s something you figure would at least give him some pause when he ponders his post-2023 plans.
2. Should a Cup Series championship be decided by who gets hot down the stretch?
Harvick’s sudden resurgence has highlighted a real weakness with the current system that decides who wins the NASCAR championship. It’s possible for a driver to more or less sleepwalk through almost the entire regular season, win a few races and be very much alive to win the title.
Two things to note: First of all, this isn’t suggesting that the No. 4 team was taking it easy (in fact it was certainly quite the opposite), just pointing out that one could do that. Second, Harvick is…
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