Kevin Harvick dominated Sunday’s The Real Heroes 400 at the Darlington Raceway. Harvick, led 159 of 293 laps en route to his 50th career NASCAR Cup Series win. While everyone thought that he’d fare well again in Wednesday night’s Toyota 500, he was far from it.

Some may not understand. How can the car that dominated on this same 1.366-mile race track three days ago, racing in the same race car — albeit with a different paint scheme, not be as dominant.

Well, first off, it’s not that easy. Harvick, said following his win on Sunday that his approach for Wednesday night’s race would be different.

For starters, he would be coming from the 20th starting spot now instead of sixth. The dirty air would mean a change to the setup at the start of the race. Plus, Sunday’s race was run in the day. Wednesday’s was at night. On top of that, the race was 100 miles shorter in length as well.

“Yeah, we had to start 20th, battled kind of an ill-balanced car tonight,” Harvick said after earning a third place finish on Wednesday. “The track conditions were just a lot different.  We made some adjustments going into the race.  Just couldn’t get the front of the car to turn.

“Every time we tried to adjust the back, it would just take the back out.  We never could get the front of the car to turn.  Had to use a lot more throttle tonight.  The things I could do with the car Sunday, I couldn’t do tonight.”

Harvick, credits pit stops for giving him the track position gains, which set him up for a potential win again in the end.

“They kept clawing and fighting,” Harvick continued. “In the end we had a great pit stop on the last pit stop, were in position to have a chance to win the race there, and it rained.

“The whole night we wound up restarting on the bottom of the racetrack.  We’d lose three or four spots every time we’d restart.  Definitely didn’t get the good end of the draw on the restarts.

“Sometimes you have great nights, sometimes you have nights you have to battle.  It was a good two days in Darlington for us.”

Harvick, also said that the conditions were the biggest factor in the lack of speed for him tonight too.

“Temperature is just a huge difference for our cars.  Obviously with the rain all day, the low temperatures, it just affects the cars differently.

“It affected ours with the front tire not turning, the way the car traveled when it hit the ground off of turn two.  We never could get the balance of the car like we had on Sunday with where the car was tonight.

“That was magnified, starting 20th, in traffic.  Every time we’d restart on the bottom, we’d lose four or five spots.  We were very slow gaining the track position to get a better handling car till the end of the race.

“It was a battle.  Definitely different tonight than it was Sunday.”

Still, Harvick has yet to finish outside of the top 10 at Darlington since joining Stewart-Haas Racing in 2014. He’s led over 600 laps in that time frame in comparison to 63 laps led in his previous 16 starts there with Richard Childress Racing.

Also, through six races run in 2020 too, Harvick is the only driver to finish in the top 10 in each race.