In 2020, Kevin Harvick lit up the NASCAR Cup Series with a nine-win season that included a sweep of a Michigan International Speedway doubleheader. Nearly two years later, he returned to Victory Lane for the first time after an agonising sixty-five-race winless drought.
After Ross Chastain continued to antagonise everyone in the garage by tapping Christopher Bell and sending him into the wall with forty laps remaining, Harvick held off pole winner Bubba Wallace on the ensuing restart after electing to stay out over pitting. He maintained a steady pace over Wallace and would win by nearly three seconds. It is his sixth Cup victory at Michigan.
“The last restart, I had the #5 (Kyle Larson) behind me, and I knew I didn’t need to let the #23 up,” Harvick recalled in his post-race press conference. “I knew I needed to drive it in the corner far enough, but the #5 had given me such a good push. I had a car length, and I think Bubba got about up to my door. I knew that if we could just get off of turn two, we would have a chance.
“Then they were side-by-side, and then we drove down into turn one and two the next lap, and I watched them. I don’t know what happened. They all wound up all goofed up down there and up the racetrack. I was hoping that the #23 didn’t cycle out to be the second car because then we were going to have a pretty constant race on our hands, but the more they race, the further we got away.
“That’s what you want, right? To try to get away so they don’t have a draft and can make up that time quicker. #5 launched good, #5 gave us a good push, and the key was just clearing the #23 off of two and being able to go down the back straight-away by myself and not door to door and in a firestorm. That all went smooth.”
Daniel Suárez‘s left-front tyre went down with less than five laps to go, which raised some speculation about NASCAR potentially waving the caution flag to bunch the field back up for overtime, though it never came. Harvick noted such fears never came to him as he “didn’t even know [Suárez] had a problem.”
With no caution, Wallace was not able to close the gap to Harvick and settled for second. He led twenty-three laps following becoming the first black Cup pole sitter in sixty years and is riding a seven-race streak of top tens.
“I’ll wear this one on my heart for a while. I failed everybody,” Wallace told NBC after the race. “[…] It is a hell of a job for our team. There’s a lot of positives in this, but I’m a person that looks at the negatives more than the positives. I need to change that, but I want to win so bad, and this was the best opportunity.”
While Chastain might be the main character of NASCAR discourse yet again, the biggest wreck came just a lap after the lap 22 competition caution when J.J. Yeley got loose while racing Michael McDowell in a pack, triggering a nine-car accident that shot Austin Cindric into the outside wall.
“That was not fun at all and inside the driver’s head is certainly a lot less fun too,” commented Cindric. “It feels like an absolute waste to come out here and just get completely wrecked. Just irresponsible, I guess, running in the middle of the pack and just really frustrating to be out of this race this early. Finish dead last and get no points. It’s not exactly what we needed from today. I just wish we would have been able to get some more laps today. […] It’s just a byproduct of a crazy restart with 300 miles left in the race.”
“It is incredibly frustrating because you can think of 100 things you can do to prevent that, but it’s not in your DNA to just back off and just not run close to the pack on the restart, but I think if you remove a few cars from that equation, that doesn’t happen.”
Wallace’s team-mate Ty Gibbs, serving as Kurt Busch‘s injury replacement for the third straight race, scored his maiden Cup Series top ten by finishing tenth. He won the Xfinity Series race the previous day.
Race results
| Finish | Start | Number | Driver | Team | Manufacturer | Laps | Status |
| 1 | 16 | 4 | Kevin Harvick | Stewart-Haas Racing | Ford | 200 | Running |
| 2 | 1 | 23 | Bubba Wallace | 23XI Racing | Toyota | 200 | Running |
| 3 | 9 | 11 | Denny Hamlin | Joe Gibbs Racing | Toyota | 200 | Running |
| 4 | 4 | 22 | Joey Logano | Team Penske | Ford | 200 | Running |
| 5 | 24 | 12 | Ryan Blaney | Team Penske | Ford | 200 | Running |
| 6 | 7 | 19 | Martin Truex Jr. | Joe Gibbs Racing | Toyota | 200 | Running |
| 7 | 8 | 5 | Kyle Larson | Hendrick Motorsports | Chevrolet | 200 | Running |
| 8 | 10 | 43 | Erik Jones | Petty GMS Motorsports | Chevrolet | 200 | Running |
| 9 | 30 | 48 | Alex Bowman | Hendrick Motorsports | Chevrolet | 200 | Running |
| 10 | 11 | 45 | Ty Gibbs* | 23XI Racing | Toyota | 200 | Running |
| 11 | 13 | 9 | Chase Elliott | Hendrick Motorsports | Chevrolet | 200 | Running |
| 12 | 20 | 24 | William Byron | Hendrick Motorsports | Chevrolet | 200 | Running |
| 13 | 26 | 3 | Austin Dillon | Richard Childress Racing | Chevrolet | 200 | Running |
| 14 | 25 | 42 | Ty Dillon | Petty GMS Motorsports | Chevrolet | 200 | Running |
| 15 | 33 | 6 | Brad Keselowski | RFK Racing | Ford | 200 | Running |
| 16 | 19 | 17 | Chris Buescher | RFK Racing | Ford | 200 | Running |
| 17 | 21 | 31 | Justin Haley | Kaulig Racing | Chevrolet | 200 | Running |
| 18 | 31 | 33 | Austin Hill* | Richard Childress Racing | Chevrolet | 200 | Running |
| 19 | 32 | 7 | Corey LaJoie | Spire Motorsports | Chevrolet | 200 | Running |
| 20 | 23 | 14 | Chase Briscoe | Stewart-Haas Racing | Ford | 200 | Running |
| 21 | 35 | 77 | Josh Bilicki* | Spire Motorsports | Chevrolet | 200 | Running |
| 22 | 34 | 51 | Cody Ware | Rick Ware Racing | Ford | 200 | Running |
| 23 | 36 | 78 | B.J. McLeod* | Live Fast Motorsports | Ford | 199 | Running |
| 24 | 22 | 1 | Ross Chastain | Trackhouse Racing Team | Chevrolet | 199 | Running |
| 25 | 15 | 99 | Daniel Suárez | Trackhouse Racing Team | Chevrolet | 198 | Running |
| 26 | 2 | 20 | Christopher Bell | Joe Gibbs Racing | Toyota | 193 | Accident |
| 27 | 37 | 38 | Todd Gilliland | Front Row Motorsports | Ford | 188 | Running |
| 28 | 14 | 34 | Michael McDowell | Front Row Motorsports | Ford | 187 | Running |
| 29 | 6 | 8 | Tyler Reddick | Richard Childress Racing | Chevrolet | 110 | Engine |
| 30 | 12 | 16 | Noah Gragson* | Kaulig Racing | Chevrolet | 109 | Accident |
| 31 | 17 | 41 | Cole Custer | Stewart-Haas Racing | Ford | 94 | Accident |
| 32 | 27 | 21 | Harrison Burton | Wood Brothers Racing | Ford | 29 | Accident |
| 33 | 28 | 47 | Ricky Stenhouse Jr. | JTG Daugherty Racing | Chevrolet | 25 | Accident |
| 34 | 18 | 10 | Aric Almirola | Stewart-Haas Racing | Ford | 25 | Accident |
| 35 | 29 | 15 | J.J. Yeley* | Rick Ware Racing | Ford | 24 | Accident |
| 36 | 3 | 18 | Kyle Busch | Joe Gibbs Racing | Toyota | 24 | Accident |
| 37 | 5 | 2 | Austin Cindric | Team Penske | Ford | 24 | Accident |
* – Ineligible for points