Three races into the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series season, Stewart-Haas Racing is off to a tough start. After all four of its drivers crashed in the Daytona 500, the organization has struggled to find speed for the last two weeks. This past weekend’s race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway was another slog for the SHR with Chase Briscoe, Aric Almirola and Ryan Preece all failing to finish in the top 10. But in a familiar pattern, Kevin Harvick led the charge for the four-car team and clawed his way to a ninth-place finish.
Harvick announced during the offseason that 2023 would be his last year as a full-time Cup Series driver. He will conclude a 23-year run at NASCAR’s highest level, the last 10 of which will be with SHR. For most of that time, Harvick has been the organization’s standard bearer. To date, he has racked up 37 wins and a championship in the No. 4 car. Those numbers include 21 wins from 2018-2020 – a three-year stretch when SHR had a legitimate claim to being the best team in NASCAR.
That period of dominance ended abruptly in 2021. That year, the spring race at Las Vegas turned out to be a harbinger for the difficult season that laid ahead. Harvick started on the pole per NASCAR’s post-Covid metric qualifying rules, only to plummet through the field. Briscoe and Cole Custer fared no better, and Almirola crashed out of the race during the third stage. Harvick’s 20th-place result was the best the team could do.
The 2021 season went on to include more of the same struggles for SHR, especially on the intermediate tracks. Harvick went winless for the first time since 2009 and did not advance beyond the second round of the elimination-style playoffs for the first time ever. Yet that was still a much better result than the rest of the team. Almirola snuck into the playoffs with a win but was quickly eliminated during the first round. Briscoe and Custer did not earn a single top five all year. Even in a highly disappointing season, Harvick was still a cut above his teammates.
Sunday’s race at Las Vegas brought back too many memories of that rough outing two years ago. The biggest difference was that Harvick was able to run around 10th for most of the afternoon and secure a decent finish. Otherwise, the race was a disaster for SHR. Almirola had a good result in sight before spinning out on lap 264, setting up an overtime restart. Preece, who took over the No. 41 from Custer this year, was already a lap down when he got…
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