As he prepares for his 23rd and final season in NASCAR’s Cup Series, it’s fair to wonder where Kevin Harvick stands among the sport’s all-time greats.
Harvick, 47, is tied with Kyle Busch for ninth on the all-time wins list with 60 — ahead of greats Tony Stewart, Rusty Wallace and Junior Johnson.
Additionally, Harvick has recorded 245 top-five finishes, 430 top 10s and 15,901 laps led in 790 starts. He has won at nearly every track on the circuit and found victory lane in three different decades and in four different generations of cars. In 2007, he won one of the most thrilling Daytona 500 races of all time.
In 2014, Harvick won his only Cup Series championship. For a driver of his stature, it may seem underwhelming for him to have “only” won one title, but in today’s playoff format, championships are harder to win than ever.
During his career, Harvick scored the most points over the course of the full season four times (2010, 2015, 2016 and 2020). That’s not to say that he would have — or even should have — been the champion in all of those years in a season-long format. It does show, however, that he has been much better than his title count.
It’s also important to note that, aside from a few strong years at Richard Childress Racing, Harvick didn’t become truly dominant until moving to Stewart-Haas Racing in 2014. By that point, he was already in his late 30s. It’s plausible that he might have been even better had he raced for an elite team his entire career.
From 2014-2020, Harvick won 35 races and led 11,139 laps — an average of more than 1,500 laps per year. For reference, Chase Elliott led the Cup Series in laps led in 2022 with 857. Harvick’s dominance was truly one of the greater stretches in recent memory.
Dock Harvick for coming up short in the big moments if you wish — after all, the playoffs never stopped Jimmie Johnson from racking up titles.
But in NASCAR’s most competitive era ever, Harvick is at worst a first-ballot Hall of Famer and at best one of the top 10 drivers of all time.
