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MONSTER ENERGY NASCAR CUP SERIES: CONSUMERS ENERGY 400

August 11, 2019

Kevin Harvick

Brooklyn, Michigan

Q. Another win, congratulations.
KEVIN HARVICK: Yeah, it was, like you say, a day of a little bit of adversity that we were able to overcome. But we just had a really fast car all weekend. Our car handled really well today, and with the multiple lanes, we were able to run all three lanes pretty well and make our way through traffic. So just really proud of everybody on our Mobil 1 Ford, everybody from Busch and Hunt Brothers and Jimmy John's and everybody back at the shop from Haas Automation and Stewart‑Haas Racing, just put a really fast car on the racetrack and we were able to capitalize on it, and that's always fun.

Q. When Marty got to you on the racetrack, you seemed winded.
KEVIN HARVICK: I was. The more you turn off, the faster it goes, so with like 30 to go I shut everything, all the air conditioners and foot fans and everything off, and it just got hot, and then I had to lift him up, walk him around the car and then walk back around, and it's a lot for me to get in and out of the car nowadays. Yeah, so it was‑‑ I was a little hot.

Q. We talk about you have good race cars, but Doug Yates that builds the engines, and you think about horsepower, you don't necessarily think about fuel mileage being that good. What do you have to do as a driver to make all of that work knowing what you had to do?
KEVIN HARVICK: Well, you remember those days when you made the most power and you had the best fuel mileage, right? It's nice. Doug and everybody at Roush Yates Engines does a great job, and obviously Ford puts a big circle around these two Michigan races to come up here and be the top manufacturer, and when you look at our engine program, I think that these particular racetracks really fit the style of our torque curves and the things that we do, and it was right in our wheelhouse. A lot of things different on the car from the first race. The evolution of these race cars is rapid, and when you talk about the engine shop, obviously Mobil 1 is a huge part of that in being able to develop new oils, and today was no different with the new oil and things in the car.
It was a good day and a lot of pieces coming together, and hopefully when we get to Las Vegas there will be a few more come together, as well.

Q. Take us inside your helmet; you're running third or fourth, chasing the 11, I guess you got around the 21 and there's the 2 and all these guys. You're saving fuel and trying to get to the front at the same time to get around Logano, and when you finally got around him, what's it like racing under those conditions?
KEVIN HARVICK: Well, for me I wasn't really having to save fuel, and I felt like the key to winning the race was getting around the 2. I felt like in clean air he was going to be the hardest one to pass. I felt like the 22 fell off as the runs went and it didn't seem like his car was going to be as good, and my car was still handling really well, top, bottom and middle. I could run anywhere on the racetrack, and I felt like his was a little more line sensitive as to where he needed to run on the racetrack.
For me, I‑‑ they told me I was one or two laps to the good, and when I got the lead and got a good enough distance, then I tried to start managing the throttle. It's a lot easier to manage that gap than it is to try to manage passing and saving. Yeah, we were able to do some burnouts and drive it back to Victory Lane, so we had plenty of gas.

Q. You're getting ready to race for possibly a second championship. You're going to be in the Hall of Fame already, but talk to me as a dad how special these moments are with Keelan here.
KEVIN HARVICK: Yeah, for me it's pretty awesome because I didn't say anything and he asked me right when I walked out the door, and he's like, hey, if we win today, I get to ride in the car again. I'm like, absolutely, you just make your way to pit road and we'll figure it out. We stepped it up a little today. We were able to do a straight‑line burnout and a donut, and I made him put my helmet on in case he flew out the side there into the roll bars. I said, you'd better put the helmet on, and we did some burnouts. So that was pretty cool.

Q. Jeff Burton brought it up and then Marty brought it up a little bit later talking to you and talking to a couple other people. We saw it last year with the 22 team. Are you guys peaking at the right time?
KEVIN HARVICK: Yeah, you know, we really got off on the wrong foot as far as where we needed to be on the cars, and it's been kind of an uphill battle really all year to get where we needed to be. The cars have been running a lot better as we've got into the last two months, and Dale knows this, I've been nursing a shoulder injury for the last two months to try to make sure I made it through Watkins Glen, and that was no problem. I hurt myself throwing a baseball to him, so it's cut into my golf game. So we've had a lot of things that we've had to overcome to get to this point.
But it's kind of like last year; we started off on fire, we won eight races and the didn't win the championship. In the send you want to win that championship, and hopefully we're peaking at the right time.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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