No one’s been more consistent than Kevin Harvick this season… his series best eight top-10 finishes in nine races backs that up. (He finished 11th at Bristol last week.)
Following a runner-up finish at Phoenix Raceway in the last race before the pandemic-induced break in action, Harvick took over the NASCAR Cup Series points lead – by a single point over two-race winner Joey Logano. And he’s only strengthened it since, now leading Logano by 24 points heading into Atlanta.
Since he took over the points lead, Harvick has earned his first win of the season – capturing the victory at the first race back after the break in Darlington. And Atlanta might just be the place where he secures his second win.
Atlanta Motor Speedway has been both a productive and sentimental venue for the 44-year old Californian.
He scored his first career NASCAR Cup Series win at Atlanta in 2001 in the No. 29 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet – the same car that Dale Earnhardt drove (as No. 3) when he died in that season’s Daytona 500. A then-25-year-old Harvick, in only his third career series start, earned one of the most emotional wins in the sport’s history that afternoon.
He answered it 17 years and 27 Atlanta races later with a victory in 2018. And he’s a favorite this weekend too.
Harvick has 14 career top-10 finishes at Atlanta – 11 in the last 13 races. The driver of the No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford has led an unmatched 960 laps in just the last six races, including 181 in his 2018 victory and an impressive 292 of the 325 laps in his 2017 ninth-place run.
