NASCAR: ‘The cars are not the issue’ for Stewart-Haas Racing

Stewart-Haas Racing have struggled throughout the 2021 NASCAR Cup Series season, but Kevin Harvick says that the cars are not currently the issue.

In the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series season, Stewart-Haas Racing led all teams in wins with 10, and Kevin Harvick himself led all drivers in wins with nine, the highest single-season win total for any driver since 2008.

But since the end of last year’s playoff round of 16, the team’s only win came this past July at New Hampshire Motor Speedway with Aric Almirola.

It has been a struggle for Stewart-Haas Racing in 2021 to say the least. One year after all four of their drivers qualified for the playoffs, with Harvick as the top seed, Harvick was the second to last driver to qualify, and Almirola, the team’s only other playoff driver thanks to his upset victory, was well outside the top 20 in the regular season point standings.

But on a positive note, both Harvick and Almirola find themselves above the round of 12 cut line with only tonight’s race at Bristol Motor Speedway remaining on the round of 16 schedule.

And Harvick wouldn’t be surprised if he was able to win at the venue where he most recently won last September.

“If we went out and won this weekend, it would not surprise me,” he told Beyond the Flag. “I feel like the cars have been a lot better. The cars are not the issue at this particular point. It wouldn’t surprise me to go out and hit it at a place like Bristol because there are a lot of things that are different from some of the other tracks that we go to in the things that you put into the setups and things like that, and the process that goes along with that. So that wouldn’t surprise me at all.

WynnBET lists Harvick’s odds at +900 to get the job done in Saturday night’s Bass Pro Shops NRA Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway. NBC Sports Network is set to broadcast this race live beginning at 7:30 p.m. ET, so if you have not yet begun your free trial of FuboTV, now would be a great time to do so!

“You just keep plugging along, and I think as I’ve gone through, this being my 21st year doing this, you have moments where you go through week after week after week and you have the fastest car and you can’t win, sometimes you have the slowest car and you win. … You just have to keep pushing forward week after week after week and it all goes in cycles. Nothing would surprise me at this point.”