Kevin Harvick explains how Ryan Blaney could have been better at Phoenix

Kevin Harvick tried to make sense of how Ryan Blaney wasn’t able to get by his teammate Joey Logano in the closing laps at Phoenix Raceway.

Blaney had the best car, and he seemed destined to win back-to-back Cup Series titles, but it was Logano who elevated and took home his third championship instead, capping off a rollercoaster season that many have deemed wasn’t title-worthy. Still, he’s on top of the NASCAR world after this past weekend, and Harvick took a stab at trying to examine where it went wrong for the runner-up.

“Well, I think that the biggest thing for Blaney is he could have had a better restart at the end,” Harvick stated, via the latest episode of Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour. “That’s really where Joey beat him, was just having that restart and being able to get to the lead. I know that the No. 24 had only one lap on his tires, but stickers to one-lap scuffs is a big difference when you fire off on the restart. They just drove around him. So, the biggest trouble that Blaney had was getting through the No. 5 car and the No. 24 car. He just — they held him up for a tremendous amount of time, and he lost so much ground to Logano that he was just never able to make it up.

“He, by far, had the best car, but it all came down to that restart with about 50 laps to go, and being able to execute and put yourself in position at that particular time, and Joey Logano did it. He put himself in position to go out and get the lead. I think, when you look at the No. 24, he was just a fourth or fifth place car. The No. 45 was a tenth place car. So, it was really coming down to the No. 12 and the No. 22, when it was all said and done.”

As Harvick alluded to, the final restart at Phoenix might live rent-free in Blaney’s head for a long time after this past weekend. While he was happy for his Team Penske teammate, Blaney certainly did enough to warrant back-to-back titles, but he came up one spot shy in the end.

Whether NASCAR adjusts the playoff format moving forward remains to be seen, and perhaps we wouldn’t be seeing such an outcry if Ryan Blaney was able to pull off the win. Kevin Harvick and the rest of the motorsports world recognizes the fantastic shot he had at it, but it wasn’t meant to be.