Kevin Harvick: ‘Everyone wants to put the blame on Denny Hamlin’

The first weekend of NASCAR is in the books following the Cook Out Clash at Bowman Gray and Denny Hamlin can rest a little bit easier.

Hamlin finished the race in third, trailing only winner Chase Elliott and runner-up Ryan Blaney. It was an excellent sequence of driving for Hamlin, coming off a tumultuous offseason filled with lawsuits against NASCAR.

“We’re all going to question Denny Hamlin, right?” Kevin Harvick said. “That’s just the easy target. So everybody wants to put the blame, question, whatever it is, on Denny.

“But you can’t deny the fact that they came out of the gate: first practice, horrible, couldn’t get out of their own way. Second practice, fastest. Qualifies up front, wins his heat race, leads a lot of the race, puts himself in position. I think a lot of people don’t give Denny Hamlin credit for how he can compartmentalize things and is able to let all the noise and all the chatter not bother him. He knows what to do.”

At various points it looked like Hamlin might have a shot to get out in front during the main event, but it was hard to stay up in the lead spots for long. To finish third was impressive in a field that was muscling its way around the track.

To do all that with the backdrop of the offseason? Even more impressive, Harvick said on the Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour podcast.

“When he needs to shift his focus from 23XI and everything that’s going on with the lawsuit and his drivers over there not having enough sponsorship on his car to just going in and saying, ‘OK, I need to focus on what do I need to do with Chris Gayle, what do I need to do to make sure that this system is set up how I want it to be with my driving style, be the leader of the team to say, ‘OK, we need to do this, this is what I feel’ and let Chris make the decisions on the car,” Harvick said.

“Proved it all this weekend. They came right out and served notice that not much has changed. I think Chris Gabehart being behind the scenes, working in the shop is going to probably help all the teams within JGR.”

Harvick explained how Denny Hamlin avoided a potentially sticky situation heading into Daytona.

“Here’s what happens, right? You go to the first race, you’re expected to run well,” Harvick said. “Short, flat track we think Denny Hamlin, right? Joe Gibbs Racing car, we think those cars should run well at that particular race. And now the noise goes down. They spent the time to do the things that they needed to do to make sure their house was in order, and we all wondered if it was going to be in order. 11 car’s in order. And they went to the racetrack, performed well.

“Now they go to the media day and the questions, they’re already set. The conversation they controlled by their performance. And they go to media day now, Denny Hamlin will have to answer lawsuit questions. Now he doesn’t have to answer questions about the performance of the 11 car because first race on track they made it happen.”

Harvick summed it up pretty succinctly.

“Performance trumps it all,” he said. “I think this weekend Denny Hamlin served notice that things aren’t really going to change, we’re still going to be contenders.”

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