Kevin Harvick discloses the overlooked reason behind Team Penske’s 2025 struggle

Former NASCAR Cup Series champion Kevin Harvick believes bad luck and not poor performance has been the real reason behind Team Penske’s early-season struggles in 2025. Harvick shared his thoughts on a recent episode of his Happy Hour podcast, saying the team’s results didn’t match how fast its cars have been this year.

Team Penske drivers Austin Cindric, Ryan Blaney, and Joey Logano have all shown strong speed this season. They have led hundreds of laps and consistently run near the front of the field. However, strong results were hard to come by in the early part of the season.

For example, the team led 125 of 201 laps at the Daytona 500, yet none of their drivers finished in the top five. At Atlanta, Team Penske led 131 of 266 laps, but only Blaney cracked the top 10.

However, the team has only recently started turning strong pace into wins. Cindric scored a victory at Talladega, followed by Logano’s win at Texas, giving Team Penske their first back-to-back wins of the season. About the team’s early struggles, Kevin Harvick shared (22:10 onwards):

"A lot of their struggles at the beginning of this season have not been performance, you know. It's been bad luck, mistimed things happening, whatever the case has been. And you know, to hear Joey (Logano) talk about his car on the victory lap interview this week, I mean, he was very confident in the speed of his race car and what they had after practice. So they're there, and Ryan Blaney's consistently been really fast."

"You listen to Blaney after the race, he was really frustrated with himself and just whatever decisions he had to make there at the end of the race. But he's definitely frustrated with where everything is, and you can hear it in his interviews now... He knows he has the cars that are capable to be winning these races. So yeah, tough scenario for those guys, but they're all working through it," Kevin Harvick added.

As the regular season nears its halfway point, the championship standings are starting to reflect the team’s improvement. Blaney and Logano are both inside the top 10, while Cindric is 14th.

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Joey Logano tells Kevin Harvick how Team Penske solves its problems

After his win at Texas Motor Speedway, Joey Logano joined Kevin Harvick for a Victory Lap interview, where the two discussed how Team Penske handles tough situations. Harvick asked Logano how the team manages to stay focused despite having fast cars but struggling to win races earlier in the season.

Logano responded by saying the team follows a clear and disciplined process, elaborating (6:10 onwards):

"I think the clear answer to me is that we're a process-driven organization. Meaning that when there is an issue, there is a process of figuring it out, and then we will start a new process of, like, okay, 'How do we make sure this doesn't happen again?"

Logano said that when problems come up, the team doesn’t panic. Instead, it breaks down the issue, learn from it, and works to make sure it doesn’t repeat. Logano added that one of Team Penske’s strengths is the way the team thinks.

"It's just a very disciplined, 'this is how we're going to do it,' and a very engineering process minds there that like look at things from that standpoint. So I think that's where our advantage is," he added.

Logano is currently ninth in the NASCAR Cup Series drivers' standings with 288 points. He trails the leader, William Byron, by 133 points.