“I think that one part that a lot of top-tier drivers don’t understand is that part of their job is the showmanship piece of it and engaging with the people to sell yourself and not turn your back on them,” Harvick said on the Happy Hour podcast.
What Harvick says makes sense, given that many of the drivers from previous generations lived through their aggressive on-track personas.
In fact, ‘The Intimidator’ Dale Earnhardt had such a strong presence on the track that the drivers would begin making mistakes the minute he started trailing them for an overtake. Moreover, the likes of his son, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Greg Biffle, and Tony Stewart were so exceptionally popular that the sport felt like it was built around them.
This is something that the current generation of drivers lacks. While they might be popular, they don’t have that loyal, dedicated fanbase that many of the greatest drivers back in the day had.
“There’s a lot of fans that just don’t know who to root for. And those moments like that are how those fans find new drivers, and I don’t think that a lot of the drivers in the garage understand the showmanship piece of it,” Harvick added.
In recent years, drivers, including the likes of Chase Elliott and even his teammate, William Byron, have faced criticism for this. It has been a bit too harsh for the former, considering he has won NASCAR’s Most Popular Driver Award eight consecutive times despite the clear lack of showmanship.
But there seems to be a strong reason why he has managed to win the award over the years, as none other than Dale Earnhardt Jr. came to Elliott’s defense.
Dale Jr. defends Chase Elliott
While the tracks have seen a growing number of No. 77 supporters, and even Cleetus McFarland’s fans are slowly warming to Hocevar, Dale Earnhardt Jr., who won the Most Popular Driver Award 15 times, feels it still wouldn’t be enough to stop Elliott from winning it.
“Cleetus would have to campaign on social daily to make it competitive,” he wrote on X.
Moreover, when a fan attacked Dale Jr., claiming that he didn’t know what the real numbers of the votes were, Junior replied with a sarcastic blow.
“I won it 15 times and have a pretty solid understanding of how it works,” he said.
One of the strongest aspects of Chase Elliott having such strong support lies in his family’s history. His father, Bill Elliott, is the only NASCAR driver to have won the award a whopping sixteen times. Safe to say that folks back in the day remained quite impressed with him. And it was only apparent that the moment Chase made his full-time Cup debut, those nostalgia-filled fans began voting for him, and have since not stopped.
This is one of the reasons why no other driver has won the award since 2016. No matter how popular Hocevar gets amongst the new generation of fans, no matter how much social media campaigning he does, it’s hard to win over the older generation, which has been voting for Elliott for almost a decade at this point.
But as Kevin Harvick says, showmanship is an important aspect of being a NASCAR driver, and Hocevar excels in it. So, if he manages to perhaps win a few more races, he might as well challenge Elliott for the award.
