Kevin Harvick took some time to address the trials and tribulations a trio of NASCAR champions have been going through in 2024 in Kyle Busch, Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney.
First off, Blaney and Logano are the two most recent NASCAR Cup Series champions, but 2024 has been a borderline nightmare for both wheelmen. During the latest episode of Harvick’s Happy Hour, the FOX analyst tried to make sense of the Team Penske duo’s lack of success this season.
“I’m a little bit surprised with Blaney. Obviously, this weekend, Blaney was in position to win the race,” Harvick explained, regarding the Team Penske teammates. “Logano has, you know, we saw that dominant performance at North Wilkesboro, but outside of the Daytona 500, I don’t really view him as being in contention to be that dominant car and lead the laps, like we’re used to seeing Joey Logano.
“That surprises me, a little bit, at this point in the season. I think that they ran, they got a decent finish this weekend.”
While Blaney has come close to wins in Atlanta and this past weekend in Illinois, Harvick noted that Logano hasn’t been a major factor in almost any race, outside of the Daytona 500 and the All-Star Race. However, he believes the situation is even more dire for Busch, who’s been struggling since the middle of 2023.
“Kyle Busch, I look at Kyle Busch, he came out and had a chance to win, he ran well at the Daytona 500 this year. They came out like gangbusters last year,” Harvick recalled. “Right out of the box, all the way through this race last year. Then, it kind of tapered off. I feel like the performance kind of just leveled off. We’ve seen some sporadic peaks of performance, as they’ve gone from last year at St. Louis to this year at St. Louis, but never that beginning of the year, newly-wed phase that they went in at RCR when he first went to RCR.
“So, to me, that’s a situation to where everybody was on full-alert, ‘Okay, we’ve got to make this work,’ last year, when we start this relationship off new, and they’ve got to figure out how to get back to that level of participation, and all the things that they were doing in the first six months of that relationship with Kyle Busch and RCR.”
As it stands, Kevin Harvick recognizes Kyle Busch, Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney are far too talented to be kept down for too long. It’s only a matter to time before they turn it around, but the clock is ticking for each driver to do so in 2024.
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