NASCAR: Kevin Harvick sees winless driver as biggest title threat

Kevin Harvick sees Kyle Busch as his biggest threat aside of Denny Hamlin to win the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series championship, despite his winless start to the year.

With just six races remaining in the 26-race 2020 NASCAR Cup Series regular season before the four-round, 10-race playoffs, the playoff picture is taking shape.

Stewart-Haas Racing’s Kevin Harvick and Joe Gibbs Racing’s Denny Hamlin have been the two dominant drivers so far this year, having combined to win 45% (9 of 20) of the races that have been contested.

While Harvick sits behind Hamlin by one win with four victories, he leads the point standings comfortably.

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The 44-year-old Bakersfield, California native has led the standings since after the season’s fourth race, and he holds a seemingly insurmountable 81-point advantage over Team Penske’s Brad Keselowski, who has visited victory lane three times this year, in second place while Hamlin is a further 34 points back in third.

Seven other drivers have found victory lane at some point this season, most notably two-time winner Joey Logano, also of Team Penske.

The six single-race winners are Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney, Hendrick Motorsports teammates Chase Elliott and Alex Bowman, Joe Gibbs Racing’s Martin Truex Jr., Richard Childress Racing’s Austin Dillon and Stewart-Haas Racing rookie Cole Custer.

But Harvick believes that aside of Hamlin, his biggest threat to win a second championship this year will come from a man who has not yet visited victory lane this year.

Asked who he sees as his biggest championship threat aside of the driver of the #11 Toyota, Harvick threw in Kyle Busch.

“I’ll go with Kyle Busch and Denny Hamlin,” he told Beyond the Flag. “When you’re racing with Denny and Kyle, you know you must be on your A-game. You want to race the best and those guys are two of the best. It’s enjoyable to race against competitive guys like that who are at the top of their game.”

Calling Busch a dark horse certainly will never seem accurate, and Harvick clearly doesn’t see it this way. But in 2020, that’s exactly how it seems.

Both Hamlin and Busch were drivers who competed against Harvick in last year’s Championship 4, yet Busch sits in just 10th place in the point standings and 13th in the playoff picture.

While Hamlin has secured 29 playoff points on five wins and four stage wins and is in position to earn eight more because he sits in third in points, Busch has just one playoff point to his name thanks to a stage one win at Kansas Speedway. He would be in position to earn just one more due to his 10th place standing in points.

Busch has won only once in his last 42 starts, a stretch which dates back to the beginning of last June. This stretch, which has rendered him “pretty grumpy”, according to Truex, comes after he won five of the final 16 races of the 2017 season, tied his career-high with eight wins in the 2018 season and then won four of the first 14 races of the 2019 season.

He simply hasn’t been himself in 2020.

But notably, his one win during this stretch won him his second championship last November at Homestead-Miami Speedway over Harvick, Hamlin and Truex, and he is no stranger to saving his best for when it matters most.

He was winless throughout the 2015 playoffs until the season finale, which he won over Harvick, Truex and Jeff Gordon to secure his first career title.

The fact that Harvick isn’t sleeping on the two-time champion should only play to his benefit. No matter how many playoff points he accrues, he is a threat to win anywhere on any given weekend, and he will be a tough out come the playoffs, as he always is, given their win-and-advance nature; he has been to the Championship 4 in each of the last five years.

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He simply can’t be counted out. In fact, his current 20-race win drought is actually still shy of the win drought he carried heading into the 2019 season finale, and the last time he started a season winless through 20 races, he advanced to the Championship 4 and finished just 0.681 seconds behind Truex for the title.

Take that for what it’s worth.

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