Kevin Harvick explains how 2017 season set up hot 2018 start

Kevin Harvick’s early season 2018 success didn’t just come out of nowhere, as he explains to Mobile 1 The Grid.

The conventional wisdom was that Ford would be at a disadvantage for the 2018 season, seeing as both of the other two NASCAR manufacturers received new body styles since 2016. Kevin Harvick has proven that view oh so wrong, running roughshod over the competition in two of the first three races of the NASCAR Cup Series season.

While he’s no stranger to being hot out of the gate — Harvick began the 2015 campaign with five straight second or better finished, though he was driving a Chevrolet at the time — his dominance through three weeks appears to have come out of nowhere. Stewart-Haas Racing was good, but now all of a sudden it’s arguably the strongest team in the garage.

Here’s the thing: This hasn’t really been an overnight success. Harvick, especially, was hot down the stretch last season, ripping off five straight top-10 finishes, including four top-5s, in the last five races of 2017.

In a recent interview with Mobile 1 The Grid, which you can see below, the leading man at Stewart-Haas Racing talked about how the organization got through what he called a “monumental effort” switching over to Ford and how it started to pay off as the races wound down.

When everything started to click, it resulted in improved performances at places Harvick and SHR were already pretty good.

"The end of the season is really where we started to hit our stride on the mile and a half racetracks, and that’s always been our strong point as I’ve been a SHR over the past four years. And as we got to Texas, you could sense we were getting frustrated at not having won on mile and a half tracks. So we had the speed and the cars. To put all that together at the end of a race and be able to win at another racetrack that I hadn’t won at, Texas, was something that was really needed at the right time at the end of the year."

Though Atlanta Motor Speedway and Las Vegas Motor Speedway offer very different surfaces and demands, both are 1.5-mile tracks. Harvick smoked the field at both of them, leading hundreds of laps en route to two straight trips to Victory Lane, backing up his claim that SHR has finally hit on a winning formula.

The other Stewart-Haas drivers have reaped the benefits as well. Until Kurt Busch got tangled up with Chase Elliott and crashed out in Vegas, he, Clint Bowyer and Aric Almirola were all on their way to running well at both intermediate tracks the Cup Series has visited so far this season.

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And the scariest part for all the other teams? Harvick isn’t even sure everything is firing on all cylinders just yet.

"The light at the end of the tunnel is glowing brightly, and as much potential as you can see in it, you can get out of it, because I still don’t really feel that we’ve come close to reaching the potential of where we could be."

For more NASCAR videos and content from around the world of racing, be sure to check out the Mobile 1 The Grid YouTube channel.