FORT WORTH, Texas – Kevin Harvick wants to reclaim his throne.

Since joining Stewart-Haas Racing in 2014, the veteran driver has owned intermediate tracks, with 15 wins and an average finish of 9.0 on surfaces between 1-2 miles in length. This mastery propelled him to the 2014 championship and three Championship 4 appearances.

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But it’s reigning champion Martin Truex Jr. that has commonly been known as the man to beat on 1.5-mile tracks the past few years. Over the same period, Truex has 11 wins and an average finish of 9.8.

“We’re better than Truex,” Harvick said Friday at Texas Motor Speedway during the unveiling of the Busch Restart Zone at the Fort Worth facility.

Harvick, the most recent winner at Texas and a three-time winner already in 2018, is looking to make a statement and put an end to the Truex talk in Sunday’s O’Reilly Auto Parts 500 (2 p.m. ET, FS1, PRN, Sirius XM NASCAR Radio).

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He’s off to a great start, joining teammate Kurt Busch atop the leaderboard in the weekend’s first Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series practice at a blistering 195.943 mph. Truex pulled into the garage P10 at 194.384 mph.

“As you look at the mile-and-a-half program in general, it’s been really good for us. I think the thing that (the media forgets) is up until last year we dominated the mile-and-a-half race tracks and have continued to do that at the end of last year and the first part of this year,” the 40-time winner said. “We did switch manufacturers last year and it did take some time to get everything situated and back to where it needed to be. Once the playoffs started last year, you really saw where the car were and the increase in performance, especially on the mile-and-a-half race tracks.”

And he’s right, of course. The difference was immediately noticeable once the NASCAR Playoffs kicked off last September.

Those eighth (Charlotte-1) and ninth-place-finishes (Atlanta, Kentucky) we saw out of the No. 4 car in the first half of 2017 at the mile-and-a-halves started trending towards classic Harvick top fives and higher (Chicago, Charlotte-2, Texas, Miami).

With a full season of transition behind them, Harvick and Co. came out firing on all cylinders – the stats don’t lie there; he won three of the first four races of 2018, two of which were on intermediate tracks – so it stands to reason that the No. 4 crew is the cream of the crop in the series at the moment, at least on these type of tracks. Truex is certainly the driver Harvick is vying for the top spot with right now, but might be the 1B to Harvick’s 1A.

It’s still (ridiculously) early, but given the intermediate-heavy makeup of the 10-race postseason, you can almost pencil the duo in for Miami seven months from now, where they’ll battle it out for what would be the second title for each driver. On a 1.5-mile track, no less.

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The scary part? Harvick doesn’t even think his organization has reached its apex yet.

“It took us some time, but I think when you see what Stewart-Haas Racing has done with Ford, we still haven’t reached the potential of where we can be, in my opinion,” he said. “I think that’s the biggest reason that we made the switch. The potential of the resources and the things that come with our partnership with Ford, we have, in my opinion, the most stable team in the garage from a financial standpoint to a manufacturer standpoint.

“In the end, it’s all about good people and we feel like we have a very committed manufacturer and ownership group and we’re just the drivers lucky enough to be in the position that Stewart-Haas Racing is in right now. We have a very solid foundation and I believe that in this day and age is something to hang your hat on.”

And perhaps, this weekend, a cowboy hat.