Richmond takeaways: Kevin Harvick happy with his roaring 40s in NASCAR Cup series

RICHMOND, Virginia – Kevin Harvick, 46, takes no offense to any odes about being the old man racer of the NASCAR Cup Series.

He relishes the title even if he avoids dwelling on its significance – that Harvick could be remembered as the most successful elder statesman in stock-car history.

“I do take pride in that,” he said. “I love it.”

With his second consecutive Cup Series victory, the 2014 champion now has 29 wins since turning 40 after the 2015 season (his birthdate is Dec. 8, 1975).

Along with being nearly half of his career total of 60 victories (tying him with Kyle Busch for ninth all time), it also ranks him third for Cup wins by drivers over 40 behind Lee Petty (42) and Bobby Allison (38). Though Mark Martin often is remembered as a middle-age superstar (having won five races in 2009, the season he turned 50), Harvick has nearly triple the wins that Martin notched (11) after 40.

The Stewart-Haas Racing driver’s contract runs through 2023, but it seems reasonable to wonder if Harvick will race beyond that (“My wife is going to kill you if you talk about racing into the 50s. I don’t know about that.

We’re going to enjoy what we’re doing, and we’d like to stay present.”).

More than four years ago after famously tweeting “#OldGuysRule” as a youth movement took root in NASCAR’s premier series, the Bakersfield, California, native shows no signs of slowing down amid so many indicators that his contemporaries moved on from racing long ago.

Harvick saw four-time Cup Series champion Jeff Gordon (now the chief operating officer at Hendrick Motorsports) on his drive to victory lane, where he was interviewed by NBC Sports analysts Dale Jarrett and Kyle Petty. His win was called in part by Dale Earnhardt Jr., who is in the