Kevin Harvick: 'We are better than Truex'

If three wins in six races wasn’t enough, Kevin Harvick confirmed Friday that he was thinking what we’ve all been thinking so far in 2018.

“We are better than Truex,” Harvick said.

Truex is, of course, Martin Truex Jr. The guy who won the 2017 championship over Harvick and everyone else. The guy who won eight races in 2017. And the guy who Harvick chased down last November at Texas to win and advance to the final round of the playoffs.

Truex and his No. 78 team were the dominant team on intermediate tracks for most of the season. But Harvick became a serious challenger to that position with that Texas win and has taken the title away from Truex to start 2018. Two of Harvick’s three wins (Atlanta and Las Vegas) have come on 1.5-mile tracks.

So as the Cup Series returns to Texas on Sunday, it’s natural to see Harvick as the favorite. Before making the declarative statement, Harvick noted that we shouldn’t see his team’s re-emergence on 1.5-mile tracks as a surprise.

“I think the thing you guys forget up until last year is that we had dominated the 1.5-mile race tracks and have continued to do that at the end of last year and the first part of this year,” Harvick said. “We did switch manufacturers [to Ford] last year and it took some time to get everything situated and where it needed to be. I think once the playoffs started last year you really saw where the cars were and the increase in performance, especially on the 1.5 mile race tracks. It just took us some time. When you see what Stewart-Haas Racing has done with Ford, we still haven’t reached the potential of where we can be, in my opinion.”

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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.

Follow @NickBromberg on Twitter

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