Kevin Harvick speculates on silly season rumors, predicts wildest one yet

Kevin Harvick believes Michael McDowell’s move from Front Row Motorsports to Spire Motorsports is only the beginning of what could be the wildest silly season in NASCAR yet.

During the latest episode of his Harvick’s Happy Hour podcast, Harvick explained how many drivers, particularly in the Ford camp with Stewart-Haas Racing, may be auditioning for their next job, instead of thinking about their future with their current team.

“They are all racing for their job,” Harvick stated. “They are all racing to keep a job, get a job, and I think this whole silly season is going to be pretty wild. It’s already started, right? Michael McDowell, I think he made a great move. Pulling himself. I’ve got to make a decision, let’s just make it happen. Made it happen. Went to Spire.

“So now you’ve got these four Stewart-Haas cars. Are they selling all the charters? Are they keeping two charters, are they keeping one? I don’t know. But it sure seems like they’re selling a few. Two, three. I don’t know how many. But there’s going to be guys without jobs. I think they know that they’re auditioning, and they’re all definitely thinking about it, because Chase Briscoe is publicly talking about it.”

One of those Stewart-Haas drivers is the No. 4 of Josh Berry, who replaced Harvick when he retired from the Cup Series. Harvick spoke a bit about Berry and his improvements as of late, believing that he still possesses massive amounts of potential.

“I think we’re a little bit, it’s a little bit unfair to Josh Berry, because we think of Josh Berry as this experienced guy, but I think that was his 26th Cup start. 25th, 26th Cup start. And we always talk about it taking 100 races,” Harvick added. “Top five at Stewart-Haas now. Top five in Chase Elliott’s car. When he ran it, it ran up front. I think we forget that he doesn’t have a lot of Cup starts. I

” think they’ve had races this year where they’ve fumbled the ball, and kind of messed things up on pit road, and didn’t get the finishes that they deserved. But they put together a whole day yesterday. Started in the back, didn’t qualify well. Started in the back, drove all the way to the front, raced up in the top ten, pretty much the whole day.”

Additionally, Noah Gragson, who’s in his first season at Stewart-Haas Racing, has been impressive in the No. 10, after a lost campaign with Legacy Motor Club in 2023. Harvick believes Gragson can steal a win with the way he’s been racing, and that’s what it may take to convince teams of his abilities, in the same vein as Daniel Suarez from earlier this season at Atlanta.

“So I think that, we’re starting to see some new players pop up, that have taken a little bit of time to get their arms around things, to get the season started well. I think that’s going to make it even more exciting to watch, because as you get more players involved in this mess, and you start looking at the bubble line, it becomes pretty interesting,” Harvick said, regarding drivers starting to figure things out. “Noah’s run well enough to pop up at one of these races and steal a win. Even with the speed that they’ve had. Maybe they don’t have the dominant car that day, but they hang around the top five.

“You hang around the top five long enough, and it’s going to be the style of race where you pop into victory lane, or Talladega finish, something like that happens. And you get one guy like [Daniel] Suarez. Suarez hasn’t run good enough to be in the top 16. You get another one of those guys that pops into the top 16, once we get into road race season and have some of these guys that might win, it gets interesting.”

As you can tell, a myriad of drivers’ futures are in flux moving forward, but Kevin Harvick believes talent will win out during NASCAR’s silly season. We’re just getting started, and it’s going to be fascinating to figure things out over the next couple of months.