Kevin Harvick isn’t a fan of NASCAR’s playoff format, even though it’s how he won the championship in 2014.
“I don’t like it coming down to one race,” Harvick said on Dale Earnhardt Jr’s podcast this week. “I don’t know that it represents the whole season well.”
The retired drivers were discussing the end of this year’s playoffs, which included disastrous finishes for the final Xfinity Series knockout race at Martinsville and the Truck Series championship race at Phoenix. Both were marred by crashes and poor driving that ruined several top driver’s seasons.
“I don’t know how to do it, I don’t know the right way to do it, I understand why they did it and I like the excitement that comes with it,” Harvick said.
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“I think there’s a way to do it where you have that excitement and don’t have to have it come down to one race.”
The Cup Series race went well enough, although Christopher Bell was knocked out by a blown brake rotor, and Harvick suggested that the younger drivers in the lower series might not be getting the best advice from their teams.
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He also thinks the officiating needs to be better during the season to better educate the drivers on what i acceptable, instead of letting them get away with poor decisions.
He singled out Truck Series driver Carson Hocevar, who ran into the back of fellow championship contender Corey Heim with 31 laps to go in the final and took both of them out of contention.
It wasn’t Hocevar’s first blunder, but Harvick thinks he gets away with too much because he shows a lot of promise when he doesn’t make mistakes.
Harvick said that if he wasn’t so good, “his career would be in the trash.”
Instead, Hocevar is making the jump to the Truck Series next season with Spire Motorsports.
There aren’t any plans for an update to the format next year, but Harvick would like to see a champion crowned in a different way.
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Harvick compared his own championship winning season, when he had 20 top 10 finishes, to the following year, when he had 28 and finished second in the finale.
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“We won the championship, but we didn’t have the best year. 2015 we had a way better year. I felt like that was the year we earned and should’ve won the championship.”
Harvick finished his full-time Cup Series career with 60 wins, placing him 10th on the all-time list.