It was a toasty November afternoon under the Arizona sun, and the NASCAR Cup Series was at Phoenix Raceway to crown a champion and to close out its 2023 season.
It was Ryan Blaney who took home the series’ most prestigious hardware after a second-place finish to Ross Chastain, but there was another story just a handful of positions behind them, as nine-time Phoenix winner and 2014 series champion Kevin Harvick crossed the line seventh to close the final chapter of his NASCAR career.
The race was the 826th start of Harvick’s Cup tenure, and in a journey spanning 23 seasons, he scored 60 wins, 251 top fives, 444 top 10s and the 2014 title in a career that will undoubtedly make him a first-ballot NASCAR Hall of Famer.
But when Harvick first burst onto the Cup scene in 2001, he wasn’t Kevin Harvick; he was the California kid who had to fill the shoes of one of the sport’s greatest drivers.
Harvick won three NASCAR Xfinity Series races for Richard Childress Racing in 2000, and the plan was for him to go full-time Cup racing in 2002 after a part-time schedule in the team’s No. 30 car for 2001. But after Dale Earnhardt’s death on the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500, Harvick was the one that took over the team’s newly renumbered No. 29.
Harvick made his Cup debut the following week at Rockingham Speedway, and he was immediately thrust into the spotlight. But it only took a handful of races for Harvick to permanently cement himself as a part of NASCAR lore.
In the 2001 Cracker Barrell 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway, Harvick took the lead with six laps to go and beat Jeff Gordon to the finish line by .006 seconds to claim the first win of his Cup career.
Harvick won in his third start, which was a modern-era record for the quickest win to start a Cup career (which has since been surpassed by Jamie McMurray, Trevor Bayne and Shane van Gisbergen).
Between Darrell Waltrip’s dramatic “Harvick by inches!” call, Harvick’s three-finger salute out the window and the photo finish that came one year after Earnhardt’s nail-biting win over Bobby Labonte at Atlanta in 2000, Harvick endeared himself to millions of fans in what proved to be one of NASCAR’s most famous and emotional moments.
Harvick added a second win in the inaugural Cup race at Chicagoland Speedway in July, and he wrapped up the year by clinching the 2001 Xfinity championship for…
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