"Denny Hamlin's tough": Kevin Harvick shares his thoughts on the JGR driver's solid day at Pocono

After a series of underwhelming results, Denny Hamlin bounced back with a top 5 finish at Pocono. The Joe Gibbs Racing driver, who has won thrice this season, was going through a rough phase of results in the last five weeks. But after his second-place finish recently at Pocono, Denny Hamlin has Kevin Harvick's appreciation for his mentality and his tenacity.

Hamlin had finished inside the top 5 for four races in a row after his win at Dover.

But after his runner-up finish at Gateway, Hamlin's next five finishes were a DNF at Gateway, 24th at Iowa, 24th at New Hampshire, 12th at Nashville, and 30th at Chicago, a spell broken by his runner-up finish at Pocono.

"Denny Hamlin's tough, and when you look at Denny, they've had a rough five weeks as far as finishes go. When you look at Pocono and the finish he had there, they had a solid day. You heard him say after the race, 'We had a solid day from start to finish.' They needed to stop the bleeding. It's not that they had been running bad, but sometimes you just get in these funks where you can't get those finishes," Kevin Harvick said on the Happy Hour podcast. [8:40]

Harvick further spoke about the differences between Hamlin's situation and that of Kyle Busch. The RCR driver has been going through a poor run lately with four DNF finishes in his last 7 races. Talking about it, Harvick claimed the #11 car has speed, whereas the #8 doesn't, which makes "a huge difference" in his eyes.

He pointed to Christopher Bell's situation earlier in the season where the JGR driver went through a spell of "miserable finishes."

This was something Kevin Harvick believed was a staple of the Next Gen car.

Kevin Harvick believes the Next Gen car has hampered one driver dominating the results

Speaking about the Next Gen car, Kevin Harvick claimed that one of the first things that came to notice about it was its unpredictability, which hampers drivers from getting consistent results.

"One of the biggest things we noticed right off the bat with this Next Gen car is you're going to have spells where things just happen, from getting in the middle of the pack and getting in wrecks, or your car is going to be off," Kevin Harvick said. [9:35]

The former NASCAR driver said that whatever the case may be, a driver won't have as many top 5s, or top 10s, or lead as many laps as they used to in the previous generation of cars. Harvick claimed it is so because of the way the races are now, the decreasing gap between competition and the field, the strategy being "more wide open", and the stage flipping.

Kevin Harvick added that because of all these new dynamics with the Next Gen car, drivers aren't as dominant as they used to be.