By: Mitchell Breuer

Entering the playoffs, the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series Regular Season Champion, Kevin Harvick did not have much to worry about. After all, he had cemented himself a large cushion over the cutoff and appeared as if he could just coast through the Round of 16, and maybe all the way to the Championship 4.

However, with the run the No. 4 team is on, relaxing has been the farthest thing from Harvick’s mind.

“I think for us you just want to keep doing what you’re doing,” Harvick said.“You don’t want to get out of rhythm, you don’t want to start thinking about what could happen or what did happen.  You just go and do what you do on a week-to-week basis, climb in the car drive it as hard as you can.  The guys are going to put what they think is the best setup in the car for that particular week, and everybody wants to achieve the same goal, so nobody is trying to have a bad night or a slow car.”

With that state of mind, the team’s mindset was set on staying consistent, which is what they ended up doing, winningtwo of the three races in the round.The victories did not just show their success, but their versatility.Darlington was not an eventHarvick dominated, instead only leading 32 of the 367 laps.

Then came their win in Bristol, which their dominance was shown, being in control for 226 laps and holding off a late charge from Kyle Busch.

“Everybody is coming to the racetrack trying to do everything that we can, but the thing I can tell you is when things aren’t going 100 percent correctly on a race weekend, we’ve got a great group of guys on pit road, we’ve got a great group of guys back at home helping us and on the pit box and doing all the things that it takes to try to climb back in the race or strategize our way back in the race,” Harvick said. “Sometimes those weeks, and I think Darlington is a great example of that, we just kept ourselves in the race and wound up in a position that capitalized on winning the race so that we weren’t really in contention to win.”

With even more playoff points at his disposal, Harvick plans to continue this strategy moving forward, in an attempt to stay in the incredible groove his team has founden route to nine wins.

“You just want to stay in rhythm,” Harvick said.  “It’s kind of like basketball or football and you look at the teams that get the first-week bye and then they go to the next week and it always makes me wonder if you wouldn’t just rather keep playing to stay in that rhythm, because I know for us, staying in the rhythm and just thinking the same way that we have all year is the best way to do it for us.”