Kevin Harvick has to be the championship favorite at this point of the year. The Stewart-Haas Racing driver has won four times already in 2020, all coming since the COVID-19 break ended, and enters Sunday’s Foxwoods Resort Casino 301 (3 p.m. ET, NBCSN, PRN) on a hot streak.

Harvick, has five top five finishes on the season in his last six tries including six top 10’s in his last seven starts overall. That bodes well for Sunday’s race at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway.

Harvick won the NASCAR Cup Series race in Loudon on July 22, 2018. He then won the race there on July 21, 2019.

He is hoping to make it three wins in a row during Sunday’s Foxwoods Resort Casino 301 at New Hampshire and lift his victory total at the mile oval to five. He also scored victories there in September 2006 and 2016.

Harvick, driver of the No. 4 Mobil 1 Ford Mustang for Stewart-Haas Racing (SHR), is tied with his former Richard Childers Racing teammate Jeff Burton for most wins at the track with four.

“Yeah, this place has been really good to us, and I think Rodney (Childers, crew chief) and I probably feel like we should have – could have – won them all,” Harvick said of Loudon. “But it’s been a racetrack that has been really good for us from a performance standpoint. And I think, from a confidence standpoint, being able to adjust on the car and know what we’re looking for, I think this is definitely a racetrack where a lot of those things came into play, and we used a lot of the same things that we’ve used in the past as far as tools of how we make our car go around the corner. I think obviously it’s been a great racetrack for us.”

If Harvick adds a win Sunday, it would be his 54th in the Cup Series, which would put him tie him at 11th on the all-time list with NASCAR Hall of Famer Lee Petty.

In addition to his four wins at New Hampshire, Harvick has 12 top-five finishes, 20 top-10s, one pole and he’s led a total of 759 laps in his 36 career Cup Series starts there. His average New Hampshire start is 12.9, his average finish is 12.8 and he has completed 10,482 of 10,690 laps of competition.

In the NASCAR Xfinity Series at New Hampshire, Harvick has 12 career starts with one win, nine top-fives, 11 top-10s and three poles. He scored his victory from the pole in June 2007. And in six NASCAR Gander RV & Outdoors Truck Series outings at New Hampshire, Harvick has finished in top-15 each time with three top-threes.

“I’d say the most important thing at Loudon is track position, just because it’s hard to pass,” said Harvick on what makes you have success on the track there. “You want to be up front and on the right strategy no matter what you do. If the caution flag falls in the wrong spot and you lose track position, it usually becomes a longer day than it could have been.”

Harvick arrives at New Hampshire first in the NASCAR Cup Series standings with 763 points, 97 markers ahead of second-place Brad Keselowski. He’s led the points since the conclusion of the March 8 race at Phoenix Raceway and will look to extend that with a solid performance in The Granite State.

Will we see another late race battle for the win still? It’s happened in each of the last two years and Harvick has been at the center of both. 

“I mean, look, he took his shot,” Harvick said of Denny Hamlin saying he wouldn’t purposely wreck Harvick to win last year. “And I think at that point, it’s kind of, ‘Do whatever you have to do.’ It’s the last lap. And I think he thought he was going to move me up out of the groove, and I don’t think he expected for me to be in the middle of the racetrack and be on the brakes and all those things. There was just a lot of scenarios there. When you look at moving Kyle (Busch in 2018) up and out of the groove, I don’t think he expected to be up out of the groove at that particular point in time, and I think he did what he had to do. It’s just like 2018, like I didn’t want to dump Kyle, I wanted to move him out of the groove and try to win the race, and I think that’s what Denny was trying to do. We raced hard and tried to do each other as good as we could and still not sell our teams short. But I’ve been in position where I’ve dumped somebody, and it doesn’t work out well for you as you go through the end of the year.”