Home » Sports » NASCAR Busch Review » Top 5 Drivers Of The 2001 Season, Part 1: Kevin Harvick

Top 5 Drivers Of The 2001 Season, Part 1: Kevin Harvick

© TJ Sampson

This Article is part 1 of a 5 part series highlighting the top 5 in points for the 2001 season.

Part 1: Kevin Harvick

What better place to start than at the top with Kevin Harvick. For Harvick, the 2001 season was filled with success and exhaustion.

Success:

Kevin and the ACDelco Team won the championship in convincing fashion ending the season with 5 wins, 20 top 5’s, and 24 top 10’s. He also won 6 Bud Pole Awards in 2001. In addition, by winning the title he made his team owner, Richard Childress, the first team owner to have won championship titles in all three of NASCAR’s premier series.

Harvick had only one DNF this year and that was at Homestead after the title had been clenched. That was only because the team decided to use the final race to test a new engine set-up.

Exhaustion:

I think what makes Kevin’s title run so impressive, is that he did it while also running in the Winston Cup Series full time. After Dale Earnhardt’s death in the Daytona 500, Richard Childress moved Harvick into the late champion’s place and renumbered the car from 3 to 29. This made for some stressful and hectic weekends. Harvick had to qualify, test, practice, and compete in both series almost every weekend. Add to that the weekends that the two series raced at different venues. Most of the weekends that the Busch and Cup were at different tracks, Kevin had to fly back and forth for each phase of each series. Harvick accumulated more frequent flyer miles than a flock of geese.

So how did he pull off the impossible? Well, success and championships are not new for Harvick. He was the 1993 NASCAR Late Model Champion at Mesa Marin Raceway in Bakersfield, California. In 1995 he was awarded Rookie Of The Year for the Featherlite Southwest Series. In 1998 he was the NASCAR Winston West Series Champion as well as the 1998 Motorsports Press Association Closed-Wheeled Driver of the Year. From the Winston West Series he went to the Craftsman Truck Series 1999 where he finished 11th in points. He also ran two ARCA events that year finishing 2nd at Charlotte and 3rd at Talladega. In 2000 he made his debut in the Bush Series scoring 3 wins, Rookie Of The Year, 2 poles, and ended the season 3rd in points. In the process he set several new records including most points by a rookie and most money won by a rookie (Greg Biffle broke many of Harvick’s records this season, look for part 4 of this series). Harvick is also the first driver to win the Busch Championship and Winston Cup Rookie Of the Year in the same season.