Kevin Harvick lauds William Byron & Hendrick Motorsports for overcoming 'black cloud' with Iowa victory

Kevin Harvick praised William Byron and his team, Hendrick Motorsports, for finally turning things around after a tough stretch of missed opportunities. The win came Sunday, August 3, during the NASCAR Cup Series race in Newton, Iowa.

Byron managed to conserve fuel over the final 144 laps of the 350-lap event, crossing the finish line first after surviving a caution-heavy final stage. Harvick pointed out how critical this win was, especially after the team lost races earlier in the season, most notably at Michigan, due to running out of fuel while in contention. This time, they got it right.

“As I'm sitting there watching the end of the race, and I don't, maybe that little fuel calculator thing threw me off, but I think the radio transmission of just them trying to keep him backing him up worried me. And I think that just the way William Byron's season has gone, they've been in this position a couple of times and ran out three laps early at Michigan,” Harvick said on the Harvick Happy Hour podcast [10:28 onwards].

“Yeah, so they've been in this position a few times, and it hasn't worked out. And it just, they needed this to to get rid of that, just that black cloud that was over them and having these races worked out,” he added.

Byron’s win was his second of the season, his first since the Daytona 500. He led 141 laps and took the Cup Series points lead from Hendrick teammate Chase Elliott. Byron had faced similar situations before, but didn’t close the deal. The Iowa win broke that pattern.

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Kevin Harvick slams Cup Series car speed after Iowa qualifying shock

Kevin Harvick didn’t just talk about Byron’s win. On the same podcast, he discussed the current state of NASCAR Cup Series cars. He pointed to a troubling example from Iowa Speedway: an ARCA Menards Series car out-qualified every Cup car. That kind of gap, Kevin Harvick said, should never happen.

Speaking on Harvick Happy Hour, he referenced Brent Crews, an ARCA driver who clocked in at 22.901 seconds in qualifying, faster than Cup pole-sitter Chase Briscoe’s 23.004.

“The Cup cars need to go way faster. Especially at the short tracks.”

Kevin Harvick stressed that speed is essential for good racing, adding:

“In the end, cars are so damn slow, they don’t race good.”

Since 2022, the Cup Series has run with the Next Gen car, which replaced the more powerful Gen-6. The older models had nearly 900 horsepower. The current ones are capped at 670, and sometimes cut to 510 at certain tracks. That reduction is affecting how these cars perform, especially on short tracks like Iowa.