Kevin Harvick called Kansas one of the worst weekends the No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing team has had in a while. He finished ninth.

To hear Harvick say such things despite bagging his 22nd top-10 finish of the season was not surprising. This team has continued to find success despite the continued push to improve its cars (the organization admitted to being so far off in the middle of the year they were changing course) and to master the new rules package. On that basis, anyone who has listened closely to Harvick this year might have picked up on a recurring phrase.

Grind it out.

Dover. Las Vegas. Sonoma. Those are just a few races where Harvick chose some variant of those words after the checkered flag. In Kansas, Harvick finished ninth after having to come from dead last when he didn’t get to qualify because his car failed inspection multiple times – a car that he said wasn’t very good in a race in which his team also struggled on pit road.

“Every year is going to be frustrating no matter how good or bad it is,” said Harvick recently when asked if it was satisfying to be posting the numbers he is despite the uphill battle. “I think this year is obviously different than other years. It’s been rewarding in the same sense that you have been able to try to make it better, and have made it better.

“So every year is going to be different; I think you know that coming in after you’ve done this for a while, and they’re all rewarding in different ways. And in the end, you’ve got the same thing that you can go race for as you did in a great year.”

Although Harvick hasn’t shown the same dominance that he did a year ago when he scored eight race wins and led nearly 2,000 laps, he does have three wins and the fourth-best average finish of any driver this season. More, Harvick’s 22 top-10s are second most in the series. What the team has been doing well is minimizing its mistakes while maximizing its finishes with stage points.

“Well, it’s not the first time we’ve done this – we switched from Chevrolet to Ford (before 2017) and changed the whole company direction,” said Harvick of his team. “They’ve done this before. At some point you know it’s not always going to go smooth, and if you can keep those dips down, the spike as little as possible, that’s your goal. You’re going to have some dips in the performance, and how you get through those and how long it takes is really what our team has done a good job at, and kept us in contention.”

But can grinding it out win a championship?

“Yeah,” said Harvick. “Joey Logano did it last year.”

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