When Kevin Harvick takes the green flag Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway, he will become the newest member of an elite NASCAR club — drivers who have started 800 or more races.
Only nine drivers have accomplished this feat to date: Richard Petty (1,185 starts), Ricky Rudd (906), Terry Labonte (890), Dave Marcis (883), Mark Martin (882), Kyle Petty (829 ), Bill Elliott (828), Darrell Waltrip (809) and Jeff Gordon (805). With 27 races left in the season, Harvick is poised to end his full-time Cup Series career with 826 career starts, ahead of Waltrip and Gordon.
Making 800 starts is an achievement, but what a driver does in those 800 starts is even more important.
I have excluded Richard Petty from much of the following analysis because his record far surpasses all others. On the flip side, I’m excluding Kyle Petty and Marcis, who each have single-digit wins.
The remaining drivers each had at least one series championship except Martin, a Hall-of-Famer and one of the greatest drivers never to win a Cup championship, and Rudd. Our comparison group is seven drivers (including Harvick) who have 11 Cup Series championships between them.
Let’s check what each man did in his first 799 races.
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Wins are important, but so is consistency, so I collected data for wins, top-five, top-10 and top-15 finishes.
Jeff Gordon leads all metrics, winning 11.6% of his first 799 races. Gordon posted top-five finishes in 40.7% of his races and top-15 finishes in 70.8% of the first 799 races he started.
But Harvick’s numbers are among the best. He ranks:
Third in wins (7.5% of all races)
Fourth in top-five finishes (31.0%)
Second in top-10 finishes (54.4%)
Second in top-15 finishes (70.2%)
In other words, Harvick finished in the top 15 in seven out of every 10 races he ran. Given that his 799 races include 90 superspeedway races (11.2%), that’s impressive consistency.
Among all drivers, Harvick ranks:
Tenth in wins – one behind Kyle Busch
Ninth in the top fives
Tenth in the top 10s
End of Races
Check a driver’s number of races not finish shows the challenges of comparing drivers from different times. The table below shows the DNF (Did Not Finish) numbers for our comparison group.
Harvick has the lowest DNF rate at 6% – but driving skills are not entirely responsible for his holding on to the top position. Breaking down the reasons for DNFs shows that better vehicle reliability has led to fewer DNFs over time.
Of Harvick’s 48 DNFs, 31 (64.6%) were due to accidents and 17 to mechanical failures. Engines make up the largest component of DNFs due to equipment at 12, or 25.0%.
Gordon had a slightly higher car failure rate: 42 out of 99 DNFs (42.4%). More than half of his mechanical failures were caused by blown engines. Even so, Harvick still had more than half of the DNFs due to the accidents Gordon had.
Elliott, Labonte, Rudd and Waltrip each had more DNFs due to failed engines in 799 races than Harvick had DNFs for any reason.
Age
Labonte ran his last race at nearly 58 years old, the oldest of this group of drivers. But his last race victory was more than 11 years – and 120 races – earlier.
Martin holds the record for the oldest driver to last win in this age group at 50.7 years. He even lost to Richard Petty, who was only 47 years old in his last victory. Harry Gant holds the ultimate record for driver’s age at last win. He is 52.6 years old.
Harvick is a relative youngster, just 46.7 years old when he last won. That’s younger than anyone in the comparison group except Gordon, who won at 45.3 years old.
Another metric that shows how the game has changed is the time between a driver’s last win and his last race. Waltrip drove 251 races without a win after his last career win. Petty drove 241 races.
Gordon has driven just 11. Harvick has gone 21 races since his last victory in the 2022 summer race at Richmond. The provisional elimination of the champion played a large part in reducing the demand for these accomplished drivers. Today’s drivers are also usually able to pull away if they want to.
As we look at age, we consider how long a driver remains productive. Since some of these drivers only ran a few races over several seasons, I will use the number of races between the first and last wins.
Harvick won his third and his 778th race, for a productive span of 775 careers. There were a couple of extended winless gaps during the run, but that was the case for most drivers. Even Jeff Gordon.
Harvick finished second to Richard Petty in terms of number of races between first and last victory, and beat out Gordon (752) and Labonte (711.)
Another possible Talladega milestone?
Harvick has run a total of 225,510 laps in his 799 races. He led 15,964 laps or 7.1% of all laps run. For comparison, Gordon led 10.9% of all laps he ran, Waltrip 9.8% and Martin 5.4%.
If Harvick can lead 36 or more laps at Talladega, he will lead more than 16,000 Cup Series laps.