A 65-race winless streak?
Been there, done that and then some.
Below the playoff cut line with four races left in the regular season?
Whatevs.
Only two spots left in playoff field?
Oh no, the horror.
This more or less summed up what Kevin Harvick faced heading into Sunday’s (Aug. 7) NASCAR Cup Series race at Michigan International Speedway and Harvick’s outward attitude toward it after he won said race.
“This is all easy to deal with,” Harvick said in the MIS media center after earning his 59th career Cup victory. “It’s really not that hard. You compartmentalize this, and you set it aside.”
This could come off as a somewhat glib response.
However, Harvick went on to remind those sitting in the media center how some of us were introduced to him 21 years ago in February 2001.
“There’s really no match for jumping in a racecar and taking over for Dale Earnhardt,” Harvick said.
Harvick was a 25-year-old NASCAR Busch Series (now Xfinity Series) driver for Richard Childress when he was called upon to succeed Earnhardt after the seven-time Cup champion was killed on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500.
A week later, Harvick made his Cup debut at Rockingham Speedway. Instead of a black No. 3 car, Harvick piloted a white No. 29 Chevrolet.
He spent the rest of the year racing double duty in both Cup and Busch as he navigated the confusing period of being the guy who replaced NASCAR’s most recognized driver.
“There’s nothing like that was for the first six or eight weeks,” Harvick recalled. “You just can’t match it. Never will. Never come close. There’s nothing even close.
“I mean, there’s never going to be a media session (at Rockingham) that big again. There’s never going to be a conversation that big again. There’s never going to be a bigger moment in my career. I’ve had all those. It’s just the rest of this stuff is pretty easy to deal with compared to those moments.
“As you get older, too, but I think that part comes with life in general. …
“Those moments you just can’t match. I think that everything after that is — that was the training ground. That was the start of the process.”
Even then, almost two years without a Cup Series win for someone like Harvick is nothing to ignore, even if he’s had a longer losing streak (115 races, snapped in 2010).
Especially when you’re 46 years old, in the first year with the Next Gen car and your…
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