Kevin Harvick recently sat down with Denny Hamlin for an interview for FOX Sports. During the interview, the topic of retirement came up.

Hamlin’s contract with Joe Gibbs Racing is up after the 2027 NASCAR Cup Series season. The 45-year-old said this past weekend at Darlington Raceway that if he had to assume, 2027 would be it. Harvick wanted an answer from Hamlin, who posed a different question to the former driver now announcer.

“If you were with a top team like I am, and you were still at the skillset you thought you were in your last year, would you go one more then?” Hamlin asked.

Harvick called it a career following the 2023 season. At the time, Harvick was 47 and driving for Stewart-Haas Racing, which folded after the 2024 season. Hamlin’s situation is different; he’s driving for arguably the best team in the sport, Joe Gibbs Racing. He’s as competitive as ever and if Harvick were in his shoes in 2023, he admits his decision would have been different.

Denny Hamlin’s situation is different than what Kevin Harvick’s was in 2023

“I probably would have. If I was driving and in your situation, I probably would have kept going,” Harvick said. “But at Stewart-Haas, it was kind of at the end, and I didn’t want to go to another team and learn another system. It also became a balance of Keelan was racing, and I got an opportunity with FOX to go, ‘OK, I can work for 14-16 weeks, whatever it is, and go do that.’

“It was a tough decision, and I called Dale Jarrett, Rusty Wallace, I mean, I called a bunch of people just to say, ‘how do you know,’ because you don’t know. But it would have been way harder in your situation.”

Harvick remained competitive all the way up until his final start at Phoenix Raceway. That afternoon at Phoenix, he finished seventh.

“I feel like as a competitor, I felt like when you quit… I thought you were just as competitive as you were for the first 20 years I competed against you,” Hamlin said. “But, again, the situation is different because the team was on its way out, and mine is still doing really well.”

Hamlin will have a lot to think about come 2027. For now, he’s chasing that first Cup championship. It got away from him in 2025, even more motivation to win it in 2026.