Last season, there came a point when a flood of criticism came NASCAR’s way regarding the Next Gen car. The car had problems from the get-go, yes, but towards the middle or the final third of the season, many big names from the garage became extremely vocal against the new car. One of those names was Kevin Harvick.

His breaking point came at the Darlington Raceway in September, which more or less propelled not just the intensity of the collective criticism, but the progress which was made by NASCAR.

Kevin Harvick’s iconic Darlington rant about NASCAR’s “crappy parts”

Harvick’s Playoff campaign last year was severely compromised after his #4 Ford Mustang caught on fire during the race which he followed by an iconic rant.

Speaking with FOX Sports, Harvick said, “I’m sure it’s just crappy parts on the race car like we’ve seen so many times. They haven’t fixed anything. It’s kind of like the safety stuff. We just let it keep going and keep going.

“The car started burning and as it burned, the flames started coming through the dash.”

Recently though, Harvick attributed his rant and his incident in Darlington as perhaps the turning point when NASCAR finally began listening and working on the problems at a faster pace.

In fact, the Stewart-Haas Racing driver made a huge claim about the state of affairs between drivers and the governing body today compared to when he was starting his career.

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Kevin Harvick claims NASCAR is listening to drivers more than ever

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In a recent interview with former driver Kenny Wallace, Harvick was asked if his Darlington incident helped fast-track the state of the affairs when it comes to the Next Gen car’s problems, to which he replied, “I think if we’d have been as involved then as we are now, I don’t know if we’d have ever evolved to that, because they were at a point where they waited too long to fix the cars.

“Lot of fires, lot of problems, and we should have never got that far but they realize it now.”

Harvick touched upon the progress NASCAR has made since then as he claimed they’ve been “much more proactive with a lot of things.

“It’s been an interesting process and some of that, I fault myself for some of that, not wrangling everybody up and really putting us all together as a group of drivers and having a better process of trying to communicate.”

“Because I tell you … we have more communication with NASCAR than we have ever had in the history of my being here. Period. By a lot. Not even comparable,” he concluded.

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