NASCAR: Is Kevin Harvick’s lead already insurmountable?

Kevin Harvick has a massive advantage in the point standings. Is he lead insurmountable as the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series regular season winds down?

Just 0.276 seconds after Team Penske’s Joey Logano crossed the finish line at Phoenix Raceway on Sunday, March 8 to secure his second victory of the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series season, Stewart-Haas Racing’s Kevin Harvick secured a second place finish.

With that, he took the lead of the championship standings, despite not having won any of the season’s first four races.

Nearly five months later, he hasn’t looked back.

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We are now 19 races into the 36-race season, and the 44-year-old Bakersfield, California native has led the series in points after each of the last 16 events. He has won four races, all since the sport returned to action following a 10-week hiatus caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

While he trails Joe Gibbs Racing’s Denny Hamlin in race wins, as Hamlin has also won four times since the sport returned to go along with his season-opening Daytona 500 victory, and in playoff points (28-22), he leads the field in total points and is projected to enter the playoffs with the most playoff points among any driver.

The regular season champion receives 15 bonus playoff points. The second place driver receives 10, and third through 10th place drivers receive from eight down to one. Hamlin currently sits in fourth, which would net him seven, meaning that Harvick has an unofficial 37-35 lead. This lead would become 2,037-2,035 entering the round of 16.

Harvick finds himself leading the series in points quite comfortably, as he has posted a series-high 12 top five finishes (next best is 10 – Hamlin), a series-high 16 top 10 finishes (next best is Team Penske’s Brad Keselowski – 14), a series-high 700 laps led (next best is Logano – 587) and a series-best average finish of 6.5 (next best is Keselowski – 8.9).

In fact, his lead atop the standings may very well be insurmountable with seven races remaining in the regular season, all this month.

With 763 points, Harvick leads second place Keselowski by a whopping 97 points. Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney (-100), Hamlin (-129) and Hendrick Motorsports’ Chase Elliott (-133) are the only other drivers within 150 points of Harvick’s lead.

Is the regular season championship battle already over?

Barring an absolute collapse, those 15 extra playoff points practically already belong to the driver of the #4 Ford. He hasn’t lost the lead since taking it way back in early March, and given the fact that it is now the highest it has been as August begins, you can bet that he isn’t going to lose it by the time the month concludes.

You can only score a maximum of 60 points in a race, and to do that, you have to win the first two stages and the race itself. A race win in itself is only worth 40 points.

Harvick would basically need to sit out of two races for anybody else to even have a chance of coming close.

Of course, there are two wild card races remaining on the regular season schedule at Daytona International Speedway, one at the road course and the other at the oval.

But that works both ways; there is no guarantee Harvick is going to have a disastrous two races while one of his “close” competitors dominates both.

Plus, the other five races on the schedule are at three tracks where Harvick has secured five victories since the start of the 2018 season: New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Michigan International Speedway and Dover International Speedway. No other driver has won more than one race at these tracks during this span.

At this point, Harvick’s chances of winning the regular season title are better than the chances of everybody else doing so combined, and quite comfortably.

Kevin Harvick and the rest of the Cup Series field are set to compete at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, a venue where Harvick secured his first win of the 2019 season and is the two-time reigning winner, this afternoon. Tune in to NBC Sports Network at 3:00 p.m. ET for the live broadcast of the Foxwoods Resort Casino 301.