Kevin Harvick, Former Champs Share Thoughts on One-Race Title Format

Drivers have approached NASCAR’s one-race, best-finisher-take-all championship format in a variety of ways.

One way that’s not successful: Treating it as a normal week.

“If you say it’s a normal week, it’s just a way to help you sleep because you can’t sleep,” said Joey Logano, who has won in this format three times.

Logano (the 2018, 2022 and 2024 champion) and Kyle Busch (2015, 2019) are the only drivers who have won multiple titles in the format, which debuted in 2014. After 12 seasons, NASCAR will likely abandon the concept of three elimination rounds to set up a one-race championship for a playoff system with at least three races (if not four or five) for its final round. There might even possibly be a return to the 10-race championship round.

Any decision on the format change will come after this weekend’s season finale Sunday at Phoenix Raceway, an end of a relatively short — but particularly stressful era — for NASCAR drivers.

Kevin Harvick won the first one-race championship in 2014 and immediately noticed the difference.

“You can’t treat it as a normal week,” Harvick said. “You have to treat it differently, knowing that the normal flow of your week is not the same. You have to do more media. You have to think about it.

“You’re going to think about it more because you know that it’s all on the line to be able to make sure you dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s.”

And the change in managing the week isn’t just in the preparation of a race car.

“The flow of your weekend will never match the flow of any of the rest of the races for the year because there’s [so much]. The sponsors want to be there, family wants to be there,” Harvick said. “There’s just the promotion of the race, things you have to do for NASCAR.

“There’s no way that you can treat it the same. But you’ve got to be able to manage it.”

And that’s where they have done it differently — from Denny Hamlin playing tennis as a release to Harvick making sure a plan was in place on how he wanted to approach things.

“You had to do your own deal, and you had to not get so overwhelmed with what you might need to say to your opponent, or anything like that [when doing media],” Harvick said.

“And you’ve got to be able to be in the right mindset going into the race knowing that you’re not going to have your normal function of a week.”

While certainly not easy, Harvick said getting to the championship is more of a relief, as the driver feels pressure going through the three-race elimination rounds trying to advance.

“The championship race itself was actually easier because of the fact that you knew there was only one way to win,” Harvick said. “The hard part — never doing it before — was getting through the rounds.

“We had to win [in the semifinal round at] Phoenix and won in the previous rounds, and all the things that came with that were way more pressure-packed than the actual championship race.”

Seven-time Cup champion Jimmie Johnson said his experience was similar. In the 10-race championship format, where he won six of his seven titles, every race had the championship pressure.

When he made it to the one-race championship in 2016, he entered the season finale at Homestead. That was not one of his best tracks but he knew he needed to win. Thankfully, he already had six Cup titles, so the pressure perhaps wasn’t as intense as it would have been if he was going for his first.

But even then, it wasn’t a typical week.

“You can try [to make it that way],” Johnson said. “And you need to try because the pressure typically doesn’t bring the best out of people, and the more you can simplify it, the better the outcome.

“I learned that I could handle pressure really well. Starting my Cup career, I did not have that awareness or confidence in myself, but as I kept experiencing new levels of pressure, we rose to the occasion.”

For Busch, the approach was different depending on the year. 

When he made the Champ 4 in 2015, he had missed the first 11 races because of a broken right leg and broken left foot suffered in a crash in the Xfinity race at Daytona. So compared to some of the other seasons, he didn’t enter that one with pressure.

“In ’15, we were playing with house money, so I would say it was easy. I was like, ‘Yeah, whatever we do here, it’s just a learning experience. Everybody says we shouldn’t be here anyway, so let’s just take it and put it in our backpack and finish this season out,’” Busch said.

“And we ended up winning the thing. But then ’17, us and [Martin] Truex were the winningest teams of the year, and it was stressful, because you were like, ‘Okay, how can we how can we beat those guys?’”

At some point in the 2018 race, Busch was fourth among the Champ 4 drivers running first, second, third and fourth.

“It was all we could do to keep up with the front three guys as they were just so good that day and just put everything together the way they needed,” Busch said.

The reason that it seems the four finalists were typically running up front? Those teams and drivers certainly had reason to push every tolerance in tech, but they also got a big push from inside the shop.

“When you’re functioning in a four-car team like that, as people get eliminated, the resources, the best engines, the best cars and everything start to get cycled to the guys that are still in it,” Harvick said.

“And, in that case [in 2014], it was a scenario to where we had the whole organization to be able to focus on one car. And if you needed something built, or something changed, you had all the resources from the whole company instead of one team.”

The shop and the drivers all feel the pressure. Harvick said everyone works on the cars so much and everyone is pitching in that the team bond became stronger.

Drivers can see the buy-in from their organizations and know that so much depends on them in that moment. 

“The pressure ratchets up every week and it affects you, there’s no doubt,” Logano said. “I would assume it affects everyone. I don’t see how it doesn’t if you care enough about it. If you care, you’re going to be digging deep and trying to find that little bit more and what’s it going to take and all that.”

Logano said he can’t envision any driver being able to go through that one-race championship and making it feel normal.

“It’s not a normal week,” Logano said. “It’s the championship week. You have a chance of reaching your ultimate goal. It’s kind of hard to treat that like a normal week. … The facts are you know it inside. Everybody knows it inside.

“It’s bigger. You’re closer to reaching the dream. What are you willing to do?”

That’s not to say that all the drivers will shed many tears that this format won’t return. 

Harvick remembers fuming when then-NASCAR CEO Brian France told him about the one-race championship format that followed three three-race elimination rounds.

“I was very jaded when we sat in the meeting with Brian France, and he sat there and told us that we were going away from our format at that time of a 10-race playoff to winner-takes-all type scenario,” Harvick said. 

And now?

“I don’t think it’s ever really achieved what it was set out to achieve,” he said.

It maybe didn’t create all the Game 7 moments as some had hoped or sparked an incremental increased interest in the playoffs each year as had expected.

But it tested every bit of the driver and the team.

“After the first year, there’s nothing better than that pressure going with the do-or-die moments when the team is all in because seeing everybody in that mindset and learning how to race that way under all the pressure, do-or-die, teaches you a lot about your people,” Harvick said.

“And being able to achieve things under that pressure is very rewarding and almost addicting.”

Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR and INDYCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.