NASCAR: This Kevin Harvick statistic from 2021 is just plain bizarre

Given how disappointing Kevin Harvick’s 2021 NASCAR Cup Series season was, this is one of those statistics that just simply doesn’t make a ton of sense.

Throughout the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series season, Kevin Harvick did quite a bit of winning — in fact, more winning than any other driver had done since Carl Edwards in 2008.

Harvick won nine races throughout the 36-race campaign to jump into the top 10 on the all-time wins list, and he also won seven stages.

His regular season championship boosted his playoff point total and thus his lead in the standings at the start of each of the first three rounds of the playoffs.

Now skip ahead to the 2021 season.

Harvick did absolutely no winning. He won no races and no stages, and his only pre-playoff playoff points were earned thanks to a ninth place finish in the regular season standings.

He entered this year’s playoffs with two playoff points after entering last year’s postseason with 57 and building up a total of 67 before the season ended.

Yet if you glance through his career numbers, history will tell you that his 2020 season and 2021 season had the same outcome.

He finished in fifth place in the standings in both seasons.

Kind of bizarre in a playoff and championship era that emphasizes winning, isn’t it?

Of course, we all know how last year ended for him. A disappointing round of 8 led to desperation on the final lap of the cutoff race at Martinsville Speedway, and that desperation didn’t pay off, leaving him out of the Championship 4 for the first time since 2016.

This time around, things were quite different (aside from the implied fact that he missed the Championship 4 once again).

Yet by the end of the year, despite the fact that he and Stewart-Haas Racing were still searching for some kind of speed resembling what they had in 2020, they were the same, as he somehow managed to piece together enough decent results to finish as the best non-Championship 4 driver in the standings.

It still marked his first winless season since 2009, ending an 11-year run.

Interestingly, his fight for fifth place in the standings was made possible by a rule known as “The Kevin Harvick Rule”, which allows drivers who are eliminated prior to the Championship 4 to battle for the top non-Championship 4 spot (fifth) in points no matter which round ends their playoff run.

Harvick, who was eliminated in the round of 12 after what was an almost comical sequence of events at the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval, managed to leapfrog every single non-Championship 4 playoff driver in points after opening up the playoffs in 16th (last) place following a disappointing regular season.

And so despite having terrible speed compared to last year and being eliminated even earlier than he was last year, he matched his finish from 2020.

He has now finished in the top five in points in five consecutive seasons. Only one other driver has a three-year streak of this nature (Denny Hamlin) active heading into the offseason.