Kevin Harvick didn’t have the fastest car in the 2020 Cup playoffs win at Darlington Raceway and he will only get better in the upcoming playoffs races.

There have been times that Harvick has the fastest car in the race and he dominates his way to the win. And there are races like the ones at Darlington where strategy played a major role, along with a bit of fortune, to win a race.

Harvick and his crew chief Rodney Childers did everything right en route to the win in the first playoffs race at the 2020 Cup season.

“It was a battle. It wasn’t necessarily pretty,” Harvick said. “But everybody on our team did a great job keeping us in the race. Rodney had great strategy. Our car was extremely loose all night, and we were able to manage to get it better but never really got it going as good as we’d like to.

“But they battled, and we kept ourselves in the right spot. The leaders got tangled up and we were in position to capitalize on that.”

The win might have come in courtesy of a clash between Chase Elliott and Martin Truex Jr., but he was there to pounce at the right time due to the strategy laid by the team.

“We knew we had done a great job in the regular season and had built a buffer. Just like you saw Rodney call this race, I think there were several moments where we could have been a lap down and he called this race to win,” Harvick said.

“I think he knows the importance of winning races. He also knows the importance of that cushion that’s sitting there. But the best way up is to have that cushion get bigger, and we were able to do that.

“That’s just the great spot that we’re in that we can continue to be aggressive and make aggressive calls and do aggressive things to try to win.”

Winning races without the race-winning speed, Harvick will only get better in the upcoming Cup Playoffs races.