NASCAR
Matt Willis, ESPN Staff Writer 6y

Kevin Harvick gets 7th Cup series win with 13 races to go

NASCAR

NASCAR is no longer on road courses and is back to ovals, and that means one thing -- another victory for Kevin Harvick.

The driver of the No. 4 Stewart-Haas Ford picked up his seventh victory of the season, a crazy number considering how dominant Martin Truex Jr.'s eight-win season felt last year. And Harvick still has 13 races remaining to add to that number.

What makes it crazier is that NASCAR had one driver hit the seven-win mark once from 2011 to 2016 -- Matt Kenseth in 2013.

So, what else was going on with that victory Sunday?

Seven wins in quick order

Whether you're sick of seeing the same drivers in Victory Lane or you're enjoying seeing drivers at their very best right now, seven wins is impressive, especially by mid-August.

Harvick's seventh win came in the 23rd race of the season. Since 2000, only Kyle Busch reached seven wins faster than Harvick. He did it in 19 races in 2008.

But -- and Harvick fans should go ahead and skip right over this paragraph -- Busch won just once more over the final 17 races, and flopped in the playoffs, finishing 10th in points after starting that year's playoffs with a 34th, 43rd, 28th combination.

Over what hill?

Are you more impressed that Harvick is winning this many races or that he's doing it at 42 years old?

I've dug around statistics for quite some time, trying to figure out if there's any correlation with age and performance. Despite some outlier seasons, one-off big seasons by drivers such as Jeff Gordon and Mark Martin, 42 really seems to be the mark where drivers start to decline.

Only three drivers in Cup series history have won eight or more times in a single season after turning 40. Most recently, it was Bobby Allison, an eight-time winner in 1982 ... he didn't win the championship that year.

Before that, David Pearson was a 10-time winner in 1976. He didn't run the full schedule but still finished ninth in points. He won just eight more times in his career after that year.

The mark Harvick should aspire to should be from Lee Petty's 1959 season. Then in his mid-40s, Petty won 11 times, as well as the Cup championship. The downside is that  Petty ran only one more full season after that and had six more career wins.

Running away with it

Harvick beat second-place finisher Brad Keselowski, winning by a little over 3.2 seconds, which is actually a little closer than recent races. The last eight Cup races have been won by an average of 3.6 seconds. If you remove Daytona (which is always a tight restrictor-plate finish), the margin is 4.1 seconds.

Overall, the average margin of victory this season is 2.9 seconds. That would be the highest in a season since NASCAR began using electronic scoring in 1993, and that season holds the distinction at 2.3 seconds, a half-second less in margin of victory than the 2018 season so far.

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