Kevin Harvick won the first three non-plate races this season. Kyle Busch has finished in the top three for six straight races, including wins in the last two.
So between the drivers who have combined to win five of the seven non-plate races, who has the edge right now for the championship? Heading into Saturday night’s Richmond race, drivers seem to think it’s Harvick.
“I still think the 4 car is quite a bit better,” Kyle Larson said. “I think you can call the 18 second-best.”
Larson noted Harvick was the fastest car at Texas, but had the well-documented problems on pit road. Harvick then wasn’t in his primary car for the Bristol race. And prior to that, he wrecked early in the Fontana race while racing Larson.
“(Busch) is really good at executing, which has helped him win the last couple of races and really run in the top three for as long as he has now,” Larson said. “But as far as pure speed, I think the 4 has everybody covered.”
As for Busch, he said his team and Harvick’s team are “pretty equal, honestly” but added “I’ve got to give them the nod.”
“I think they’re a little bit better than we are,” he said.
Busch then tossed out a third name: Larson.
“I think (Larson) may actually be in the mix as well,” Busch said. “The 42 was strong last week (at Bristol) … and he’s the fastest car certainly on the short run in practices thus far here at Richmond.”
Busch also mentioned his brother, Kurt, and Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Denny Hamlin as teams who are “getting better.” He predicted some of the Hendrick Motorsports cars would also find speed soon.
But what about Martin Truex Jr., the defending champ who dominated last season? He had five top-five finishes in a row, including at win at Fontana, but has crashed out of the last two races.
“I was kind of joking with Truex when we were out in Fontana,” Ricky Stenhouse Jr. said. “I was like, ‘It doesn’t seem like you have the speed that you did last year or (you’re) where you want to be.’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, we’re right on par’ — and then he won.
“To me, the 78 is kind of just doing what they want and kind of chilling for awhile.”
Hamlin said he couldn’t choose between Busch and Harvick as to who is stronger right now — it depends on the track, he said — but he gave a reminder what really matters when talking about title favorites.
“The championship in the Cup Series now is about winning one race — and that’s Homestead — so I would favor the 18 in that case,” Hamlin said.
Five thoughts after Sunday’s race at Texas Motor Speedway…
1. Busch is back
It had only been nine races since Kyle Busch last won, which isn’t much of a drought by anyone’s standards.
But the “losing streak” (I’m putting it in quotes because it was a pretty weak slump) may have felt longer for Busch because of some frustration along the way.
A second-place finish at Homestead last year (and in the championship) was one of four runner-up results since November. For a guy who is never happy with anything but a win, finishing second that often didn’t sit well.
“Certainly being that close, it gets a little old a little faster, you know?” Busch said. “… Being as close as you are, that kind of hurts a little bit more. Especially that final one — that one that matters, that Homestead one. That’s probably the one that stings the most.”
Much of the focus this season has been on Kevin Harvick — rightfully so, since he’s been a dominant force and has three wins. But don’t overlook Busch when talking about the best team of the season so far.
His last five races (starting with Las Vegas) have resulted in the following finishes: second, second, third, second, first.
And Busch now has seven playoff points — tied for second with Martin Truex Jr. Clearly, his season is off to a much better start than in 2017, when Busch didn’t win until late July.
“We’ll just keep plugging along,” he said. “I still feel like we need to improve more and more. It feels good to be able to run as fast as we are and still have the improvements that we can make.”
2. “Our bad!”
For the most part this season, NASCAR has officiated consistently. That did not appear to be the case on Sunday, when Ryan Blaney received an uncontrolled tire penalty but Kevin Harvick did not (when the situations looked to be at least somewhat similar).
After initially defending the decision, NASCAR released a statement acknowledging the non-call was an error.
“It was a judgment call, and after conducting a post-race review of the incident, an uncontrolled tire penalty for the 4 car would have been correct,” said Scott Miller, NASCAR’s senior vice president of competition. “We missed that call.”
There’s certainly an argument to be made that NASCAR shouldn’t have waited until after the race to determine the call was incorrect. Obviously, it would be preferable to get it right in the moment (and this would have been a MUCH bigger deal if Harvick ended up winning the race).
But honestly, I can’t ever remember NASCAR coming out like this a few hours after a race and saying, “Hey, we screwed up.” So that’s good! Kudos for that. They are human, after all.
Personally, I think it reduces some of the outrage to just admit a mistake when one happens and it makes it easier to move on. In the past, officials would have doubled down on the spin and put forth a “nothing to see here!” messaging strategy.
Fans can live with the occasional error if it is acknowledged.
3. Gunning it
In comments to reporters after the race, Harvick shredded NASCAR’s new common pit guns and called them “embarrassing for the sport,” according to NBC’s Nate Ryan.
He emphasized that point in a media center interview, saying his team has had pit gun problems in four of the seven races this season.
“We had a pathetic day two days on pit road because we can’t get pit guns that work in our pit stalls,” he said. “Today we … got ourselves a lap down because the pit guns work half the time, they don’t work half the time. Yesterday (in the Xfinity race) we had four loose wheels because the pit guns can’t get the tires tight.
“I feel bad for the guys on pit road because they get handed just absolutely inconsistent pieces of equipment. Today it wound up costing us a race.”
As crazy as it sounds, I hadn’t been on board with dumping on the pit guns because it seemed like only one or two teams was having a problem during a race — this out of roughly 200 pit stops.
And after all, it’s the teams who asked for NASCAR to step in and regulate this (it wasn’t even on NASCAR’s radar before the teams requested it).
“We’ll continue gathering information on the pit guns’ performance like we do after every race,” NASCAR’s Miller said. “It is too early to make assumptions without all the facts. It’s also important to remember that this is a collaborative initiative with the race teams.”
But as teams continue to struggle with the guns — and have their races altered by them — it’s looking like this concept should be scrapped if pit gun maker Paoli can’t get the guns to be more reliable.
As Busch crew chief Adam Stevens pointed out, teams can’t change their strategies — they have to take tires. And when the race comes down to something that isn’t in their control, it’s an uncomfortable situation.
“Is it concerning? It is,” he said. “I think it puts a lot of doubt in the (tire) changers’ minds, probably makes them make more mistakes up and down pit road than maybe what they would have if they had more confidence in their equipment.
“You’re definitely on edge, listening for a problem, looking for a problem.”
And despite being a member of the council that worked with NASCAR to implement the common pit guns, team owner Joe Gibbs has seen enough.
“I don’t like things not in our hands,” he said. “So to be quite truthful, I’ve taken a stand on that (with NASCAR). That’s something that I hope we continue to really evaluate.”
The last thing anyone wants is to see this impact the playoffs. If the pit gun issue can’t get resolved by the middle of the summer, NASCAR should give the teams six weeks’ notice and let them use their own guns once the final 10 races begin.
4. New kids
The veteran drivers ruled once again on Sunday, going 1-2-3 (Busch-Harvick-Jamie McMurray). They’ve won all the races since Daytona, although Harvick’s average age observation got reduced slightly with Busch’s win (he turns 33 in May).
But some of the “New Kids On The Track” — who appeared on a large cartoon poster outside the garage this weekend — had pretty respectable days.
Rookies Bubba Wallace and William Byron both had top-10 finishes (Wallace battled Harvick for the free pass spot at times and Byron held off Jimmie Johnson for the same position earlier in the race).
Other names on the banner with good days included Erik Jones (fourth), Ryan Blaney (fifth) and Chase Elliott (11th).
Maybe Eddie Gossage was onto something with his idea.
“We needed that,” Wallace said on pit road after finishing eighth. “Each weekend, something happened after Daytona (when he finished second). The only thing we did was shake it off and look ahead to the next weekend.”
5. What’s next?
We still don’t have a great idea which team is best suited for the long run this season.
Stewart-Haas Racing has four wins (Harvick three, Clint Bowyer one) and the Joe Gibbs Racing/Furniture Row alliance has two (one each for Truex and Busch).
In addition, the drivers from those teams make up eight of the top 12 spots (Team Penske’s three drivers and Kyle Larson are the others).
Harvick had boldly said on Friday he was better than Truex on 1.5-mile tracks, and perhaps that was going to be the case on Sunday (before Truex blew a tire and finished last). But then Harvick got beat straight-up by Busch — they were on the same strategy and restarted on the front row together with 23 laps to go.
Anyway, the point is: We still don’t know! There hasn’t been a decisive race yet where none of the contenders had a problem on a normal track (in other words, not an abrasive surface or a superspeedway or a short track).
And now with Bristol, Richmond, Talladega and Dover coming up, it’s going to be more than a month — until Kansas — when we get another chance to see which team has best figured out the intermediate tracks.
Nothing against Martin Truex Jr.’s dominating win, but Sunday sure could have been a lot more interesting had Kevin Harvick not wrecked with Kyle Larson during the first stage.
What would have happened? Would Harvick have won his fourth straight race? Would Truex have thumped the field anyway?
“We’ll never know,” Truex said.
ARGH! That stinks. Even Furniture Row Racing owner Barney Visser sounded a little disappointed about it.
“After the beginning of the season there, watching Harvick run away with everything, I wasn’t sure where we were at,” Visser said. “I wish he would have not had the problems he had today and we could have run him again. I think we had something for him today.”
Now everyone has to wait for three weeks — until Texas Motor Speedway — to find out who will win a head-to-head battle on an intermediate track (Martinsville is next week, followed by an off week).
Still, the lack of evidence didn’t stop drivers from guessing what would have happened.
“Just the little bit I was around Kevin, I felt like he still had the best car,” Larson said. “Who’s to say, though?”
Truex said he left pit road after the first stop and drove away from Harvick — which leads him to believe the No. 78 car might have won anyway. It was pretty damn fast, after all.
But there’s no way to know for sure.
Sigh. Oh well.
“I’m sure we’ll have plenty of chances to race each other throughout the rest of the season,” Truex said.
2. What was that?
So what exactly happened in the Larson/Harvick incident?
Though it initially seemed Harvick was somehow retaliating against Larson for hard racing (a theory floated by the FOX broadcast), that turned out not to be the case.
Harvick said he went down to side-draft Larson when they came off the corner, and he was “trying to get a little too much right there.”
“That’s my fault for coming down the racetrack and trying to side draft,” he said. “… That was just a dumb mistake on my part.”
Larson had a more detailed explanation when asked if he was surprised Harvick was racing him so hard. Harvick had pitted one lap earlier than Larson, so the Chip Ganassi Racing driver was coming with slightly fresher tires.
“I think he knew he was better than I was overall, so he was just trying to hold me off, race me hard to maybe burn my stuff up, and then he could stay in front of me and not have to worry about me 10, 15 laps later when he would be better than me,” Larson said.
Makes sense, right? At that point, Harvick just made a mistake rather than acting out of malice.
“I was actually having a lot of fun racing like that because this place is really cool and you can just kind of go wherever,” Larson said. “I respect Kevin a lot. I think he respects me a lot, too. You never want to see anything like that happen.”
3. Harvick, and…
After five races, it’s not much of a mystery which team is the one to beat. And it’s not the one that ended up in victory lane.
“I don’t think anything changes with the 4 car being the fastest car in the field right now,” Brad Keselowski said.
“He’ll be good every weekend,” Larson said.
If that’s the case, Truex — now the points leader — is probably second-best, with Kyle Busch also right there.
But who else is good?
Larson, for one. Keselowski and Joey Logano, too. The thing is, they’re all a half-step away from being able to run up front regularly like Harvick, Truex or Busch.
“I’ve been happy to see how we’ve started so far,” Larson said. “But we still have a little ways to go to win.”
Keselowski said he’s been about a fifth-to-10th place car most weeks and noted the team hasn’t seriously contended for a win. And Logano, who missed the playoffs last year after his infamous encumbered penalty at Richmond, said his team is “getting closer” but isn’t there yet.
“Today we had some decent speed and it’s progress in the right direction,” Logano said. “We still have a ways to go, but we’re getting closer to where we can have solid runs, score stage points, score good finishes and keep ourselves up there for points.”
There are really no surprises in the top half of the playoff standings. Truex and Busch are 1-2, followed by the Team Penske trio of Logano-Keselowski-Ryan Blaney. Then it’s Denny Hamlin and Larson.
4. Standings surprises
Speaking of the point standings, there are still a few unexpected trends after five races.
— Despite winning three of the first five races, Harvick is only eighth in the standings. That’s because of Daytona and Fontana, where he got only two points.
— All four Stewart-Haas Racing drivers are in the top 11 of the standings. In fact, they are 8-9-10-11 (Harvick-Clint Bowyer-Aric Almirola-Kurt Busch).
— Chase Elliott is the lowest-running Hendrick driver (21st) after Jimmie Johnson moved up to 18th in the last couple weeks. The lead Hendrick driver is Alex Bowman, who is 16th.
— Jamie McMurray, who has pointed his way into the playoffs, is only 26th in the standings — behind Michael McDowell and both JTG Daugherty Racing drivers.
— Daniel Suarez is 23rd in the standings while all of his Joe Gibbs Racing teammates are 13th or higher.
5. The clock says Bubba Time
As Bubba Wallace walked off pit road following a 20th-place finish at Fontana, he was already looking toward next week — his first visit to Martinsville Speedway since winning the Truck Series race there four years ago.
“Man, I’m so pumped up and so excited to get there,” he said. “I want to win this fucker. … We’ll have to be ready there.”
Unlike recent weeks — such as Phoenix, where two loose wheels turned a possible top-15 day into a 28th-place finish — the No. 43 team might be rolling into the next race with some positive mojo.
There wasn’t anything particularly special about Fontana, except nothing went wrong.
“Smooth on pit road all day, didn’t make any dumb moves on the racetrack and came home 20th,” Wallace said. “We can improve from that.”
Wallace and his team are still figuring each other out, and the team is transitioning to Chevrolet and its alliance with Richard Childress Racing at the same time. But in only nine career Cup starts, Wallace now has top-20 finishes in five of them — all with a mid-level team — and has a three-point lead in the Rookie of the Year battle with William Byron.
“We came back here (after the Phoenix disappointment), regrouped, took a deep breath and can use this as a little bit of momentum going into Martinsville,” he said.
This is the latest in a weekly feature called “How I Got Here,” where I ask people in NASCAR about the journeys to their current jobs. Each interview is recorded as a podcast but is also transcribed on JeffGluck.com. Up next: Josh Jones, KHI Management’s director of business development.
Can you describe your current job?
It’s mostly around Kevin Harvick, between Kevin Harvick’s personal racing stuff and life, to KHI Management, the management company he founded a couple years ago, to the Kevin Harvick Foundation. But I would say KHI Management is about 70 percent of my job with all the different clients I have through that management company. It keeps me on my toes.
You are one of the busiest guys that I know. I always see you quite busy walking around. I don’t think it’s for show, I think you’re legit super busy.
Nonstop.
But you weren’t always this busy, so I would like to find out how you got to this point in your life. You were once a kicker in college. How do you go from being the kicker in college to this crazy path to where you’ve gotten today? Where do you even start?
I had a great internship program after college that I had to do to graduate, and I worked at a company called Keystone Marketing out of Winston-Salem, N.C., which was one of the first sports marketing firms in NASCAR. I worked for them and I was an intern, basically doing all the dirty work, everything you had to do from press kits — what we used to call press kits, you’d print all the papers, you’d put them in files and you bring 50 little folders to the track.
I used to have a lot of those folders.
Yeah, so I used to do that. I also had to do work for the sponsors that were there, so we had Planters, we had Oreo, we had a lot of different ones. And I had to, as an intern, be the Oreo.
And one time in 2001, when I was doing my internship, I was the Oreo for my boss today. Kevin Harvick won the race, and I was the Oreo. He had won a couple times, but I was the Oreo that year. And that photo was there.
So the photo’s taken back in ’01. Fast forward to 2018. I’ve come a long way in 17 years, but honestly I always tell people it’s true when they say you start at the bottom to get to the top. I’m not totally to the top yet — I want to do a lot more stuff in my life — but right now I’m feeling very fortunate for what I’ve done.
Was your head poking out of the Oreo?
Nothing.
So you were in a full Oreo costume.
You can’t see me. It’s my arms. I’ll admit it, it is me. Kevin has a photo of it from victory lane. But yes, that was me, and to this day I still get cracked on about that. I mean, it was only part-time. I was only an intern, it was wasn’t a job or anything, I just did it to help out because we didn’t bring people to the track, so that’s what I did.
Josh Jones poses with a Mr. Oreo costume similar to the one he once wore in victory lane. (Courtesy of Josh Jones)
So how many years into your relationship with Kevin did you say, “Hey, by the way, I was actually in victory lane with you?”
I kind of kept it silent. I didn’t start working for Kevin until the end of ’05. I was working for the agency for a couple of years while I was playing Arena Football, going back and forth between both of those positions. Kevin had a New Year’s party at his house in 2006 or 2007, and somehow it came up. I don’t know if it was my wife or if it was me or somebody slipped up and said that. And then from then on out, it’s been, “Oh yeah, Josh used to be the Oreo.” But I was. I’ll admit that I was. But I was an intern, and if you were an intern in your lifetime, you understand you do anything you’re told.
So after the Oreo and after the internship, what was the next step? I mean, you don’t just show up at Kevin Harvick’s door one day and be like, “Hey, I’m going to be guiding your life for the rest of your career.”
No, and I’ve had a lot of people along the way that have guided me. But I took a job full-time with Keystone Marketing after the ’01 season. I worked there from 2002 to 2004, midway through 2005. So about three and a half years. (CEO) Roger Bear and his team worked on many different accounts from Stacker2 back in the day to the Army account — which they had a big presence with Joe Nemechek — to all different stuff.
But I landed my feet as the PR guy for Reese’s at the end of ’04, beginning of ’05. Basically I did all the ’05 Reese’s races between GM Goodwrench and Reese’s. After that was done, I was approached by Kevin and team about coming over and joining the KHI team, Kevin Harvick Inc. at the time. Roger Bear, who was ultimately my boss at Keystone Marketing, was not gonna let me turn it down. He wants to (move) everybody up, so he was very nice and gave me that opportunity. And so about halfway through ’05, I agreed to do it and here we are 13 years later on that side of it and I’m still with Kevin.
So I started as a PR rep, kind of went into the marketing side, still doing the PR, then I went into doing just all of Kevin’s stuff about 2008, 2009, and then kind of rolled out to where we are today.
Over the course of your career, how much of it has been on-the-job training? It seems like you’ve done so much that just sitting in a college classroom can’t possibly prepare you for this. So it as to be a lot of experience that you’ve gained.
Honestly, when I joined KHI, DeLana (Harvick) and Kevin and a gentleman named Fred (Lekse) who’s our company president, the three of them kind of took me under their wing and kind of got me to where I am now. They taught me the fundamentals. The one thing that DeLana and Fred always said is the people skills. You’ve got to have good people skills to survive in this sport. You’ve got to know how to talk to sponsors, gotta know how to talk to drivers, gotta know how to talk to NASCAR and all that. So I’ve learned a lot from those three; not gonna lie, didn’t do it myself.
I’m still learning today. I actually have meetings with Kevin and DeLana and Fred about every week, and honestly I learn something new every week. So I’m learning it as we go.
We have a lot of clients. I have a lot of golfers that I represent now. Kevin and DeLana and Fred have given me the opportunity to branch out to other sports, which has actually helped Kevin both on and off the track with sponsorship and with a lot of opportunities. So I’m learning as we go. I’m still not where I want to be yet. I’m still growing. I want to get bigger, and I want to make KHI Management hopefully down the road one of the biggest agencies out there, not just in NASCAR but in other sports.
When you’re in territory that’s not familiar to you, like say golf or MMA stuff, obviously you can’t show up and you know everybody. It takes time to meet people, even in NASCAR. How do you do that? Is it just a matter of going in there and saying, “Hey, I’m so-and-so,” and shaking hands and stuff?
Yeah, 100 percent. It’s literally that, but you also do a lot of research beforehand. For instance, with the golfer that we have, his name is Jason Gore, been with him for a long time. A couple of years ago, he took me to a golf tournament and introduced me to the right people. He said, “Hey, this is my guy. If you need anything, this is who you call.” Slowly but surely, it transferred; we became a pretty big name in golf and we’re working on signing more golfers. We’ve got three right now, on our way hopefully to four or five.
But when sponsorships start landing on those guys’ collars and shirts and sleeves and you see Michelob Ultra and you see E-Z-Go and you see all these big sponsors, it starts to open doors with guys saying, “Wait a minute, these sponsors weren’t in the sport ever before. Where did these come from?” And then they just started asking questions, and then the phone starts ringing.
It’s the same way in the UFC. We had one UFC fighter that came to a NASCAR race, knew nothing about NASCAR and fell in love with it. But the thing he fell in love with the most was the sponsors that Kevin had on the race car: Budweiser, Jimmy John’s, all this different stuff. And he was like, “I need some of this NASCAR sponsorship.” He had a management company, and when their contract was up, he called us. His first fight, we put major sponsors on his shorts for the UFC, and then all of a sudden UFC champion Miesha Tate was calling and all these people were calling, and it was like, “Wow.”
So it’s not just NASCAR. Whatever sport you’re in, sponsors drive everything. That’s basically it. So that’s how we’ve been fortunate enough. Now we’ve got motocross, we dabble our feet a little with some sponsorship with country music singers and then the NASCAR stuff and the golf stuff. So I mean, it’s incredible, it’s impressive.
But it doesn’t matter what sport we’re in; any independent sport which has an individual athlete — football or NASCAR, golf, UFC, motocross — they’re all in there for the same thing: They want to be seen outside of whatever their sport is, and we’re doing that by bringing sponsors to the table and help activating it outside the ropes or track or anything like that.
How do you earn people’s trust and faith in you? Is it by just showing with your actions and your work?
No. The one thing that we learn and the one thing I’ve learned through the time, through the Harvicks and through anything like that, it’s opening up. So when you go after new clients, you introduce them to your (current) clients, introduce them to your sponsors. They’re not gonna say anything bad — hopefully not. But you tell them what you’re doing for them. So on the golf side, I just say, “Hey, contact our golfers, talk to them,” and they get blown away, like, “Wow, these guys aren’t just in it for the money,” because we aren’t just in it for the money. We want our sponsors in NASCAR and other sports to have other platforms to activate around. So when we can bring more different sports in, it makes it a diverse program for all our sponsors.
Josh Jones with PGA golfer James Hahn, a KHI Management client. (Photo courtesy of Josh Jones)
So in some ways, you’re saying it works for both parties. You want your clients to benefit, but then the sponsors, you’re trying to offer them different opportunities. So instead of just taking their money and saying, “Hey, put the logo on here,” you’re trying to give them something in return?
Correct. I mean, if you look at it, look at Kevin’s car, Jimmy John’s does way more than just racing with us; they do motocross, they do a lot of different stuff, they do Brock Lesnar’s shorts in the UFC, or now WWE. Busch beer, Anheuser-Busch corporate, all their sister brands kind of come through us and we do some golf stuff here, we do some motocross here, some UFC stuff here, whatever it is.
But my point is, that’s how we branch out. Same way with Morton Buildings, Hunt Brothers Pizza, E-Z-Go, which is Textron Off Road, which is Cessna, selling airplanes in the garage. We try to open it up to a little different area, and it works.
I mean, we’re very fortunate — not to mention our driver’s a wheel man. But we also have Harrison Burton, who’s coming up through the ranks. If you look at some of his sponsors, he’s sponsored by Hunt Brothers Pizza, he’s sponsored by Morton Buildings, he’s sponsored by all these different things. At the end of the day it’s Kevin (who sparks interest), we know that, but we need other sponsors and other athletes to see that it revolves around them, too, it’s not just one person. We open them up to everybody.
People might see you and they say, “Oh my gosh, I want to be that guy. I want to be the next Josh Jones.” Where should people even start? What do you recommend that they get for a first job? What should they study? How can they get to where you are?
People call all the time looking for jobs, and it’s hard to get a job right now in the sport of NASCAR, because everything is coming to a size where it needs to be. The sport got huge really fast, we know that, and just like the stadiums and racetracks that you see, they’re downsizing to the right number, whether it’s 60,000, 80,000, whatever that is — not 160,000. We’re narrowing it down to the good people. Everybody still has a job, and you want the best there is for that position.
If I lost my job right now and I wanted to get a PR position, these PR people would kill me. I’m not a PR person anymore. I was 15 years ago, the old way. The pit notes, the programs, the stuff like that, that’s how we did it, the press kits. It’s totally different now. It’s social media based. If you don’t know social media, you’re not gonna be a PR rep. That’s basically it. You’ve got to learn it all, and it’s a lot to digest.
So I tell people if you’re gonna do it, try and get an internship. NASCAR has a lot of internships here and there, teams have internships. Because that’s the way you get in. I started as an intern and got hired. Didn’t think I was gonna get hired, and they offered me a job, and went from there. Never honestly thought I would get hired by the Harvicks when they first talked to me, but they brought me in and they saw potential and like I said, I owe it to Kevin, DeLana and Fred to get me to where I am today. Now I hope that I can continue growing and get bigger and grow a bigger company for the Harvicks and get more clients and get more sponsors and get more employees and go from there.
Kevin gave you an opportunity, but he’s given other people opportunities probably in his career and they didn’t deliver the same way that you did. So what did you do or what is your attitude to make sure you come through and don’t let these people down?
In my email, I’ve got a thing that says, “If you can’t do big things, do little things in a great way.” So what I like to do and I tell people is don’t have enemies. You don’t want to have enemies in the garage, you don’t want to do all that stuff, you want to be nice to them and kill them with kindness. Everybody always says that, face it. But what I like to tell people is, look to the future. Don’t look behind you, because if you look behind you, you’re gonna fall behind because everything is changing.
Like I’m 40 years old, I’m on social media. I got off Twitter for a long time because me and Kevin, it used to just be me and Kevin four years ago, and we used to go at each other and have fun. I’ve seen a lot of negative stuff (toward) Kevin lately on the social media fronts (after the Las Vegas penalty) so I took it as, “You know what, I still have a lot of followers there on Twitter, and people are seeing this.”
Kevin’s actually a really good guy. What happened (with the penalty) was what happened, I’m not gonna get into all that. But what I’m saying is, I wanted to post that to show people that two hours after the race ended and he won the race, these kids were screaming his name for two hours, and he went over there, high-fived them, shook hands, took pictures. I didn’t get to show the whole video, but the kid was jumping up and down for like five minutes and basically followed us all the way to the hauler until security stopped him, (saying) “You’re the greatest, Kevin!” That’s the stuff we need. It’s all about the kids.
So I’m telling you right now, look forward or fall behind. These kids that are PR guys now, these kids that work for these other management companies, they’re young, they’re gonna be a lot smarter than I am 10 years from now because they’re going to all these seminars and seeing social media. I didn’t know what Snapchat was two years ago, or a year ago. Everybody was like, “Snapchat!” and I was like, “I have no clue.” Now I have a basically teenage son that’ll be 12 here coming up. He does it. I’m like, “Well, I better get on this because I’m gonna miss the boat.” I can follow the drivers, see Kevin, see my fighters.
So these kids that are coming through the ranks right now, they either need to get an internship, start at a local level, go work for the NBA basketball team or local hockey team, minor league hockey team, get that sports job behind you before you start (your career).
I get resumes all the time. People send me notes all the time, and when I look at their resume, it was unfortunately, “Worked at Kohl’s” or “I was a sales guy for AT&T,” which is great, but I actually just hired a guy a while back who was a sales guy for the (Charlotte) Hornets. He already had that professional experience. He knew what it was like (in sports), so we hired him. The other people looked like they had great resumes, but it’s all about the experience.
And it’s hard to get in. It’s hard to get in the sport. I know a guy, mutual friend of my family, kid’s 27 years old, he’s been trying to get in for four years. I’ve been trying to help him, but he’s got no experience. But now he’s finally doing an internship with a local racetrack in North Carolina. That’s his in. Do a local internship, meet people, meet people, move on up as much as you can. So it’s tough.
Do you think it’s still possible to break into this industry if you want it bad enough?
I think the industry right now has kind of leveled off. I think we’re in a good level off period. The TV numbers have been about the same for the last year, which means it’s basically leveling off, up or down a little here and there, which is good. This is what we need to do. We can only grow. They’re making a lot of changes, everything’s starting to go in the right direction.
I think it will get back to where we can get more jobs and more PR people and more marketing people, but right now, you have to have experience every place I’ve checked. I’ve called race teams for buddies of mine looking for jobs, and it’s like, “Hey, has he been in the sport before?” And I’m like, “No, he hasn’t.” And they say, “We’re trying to find someone that knows the garage.” It’s so funny, the word “know the garage.” I hear that all the time. He’s gotta “know the garage.” It’s tough. Unless you’re an intern or you’re very, very new, it’s hard to get in.
Thank you so much for sharing your story. Your whole career path has been super interesting, so I appreciate you taking the time to do that.
Started from the bottom, that’s all there is. To get to where you’re at, you gotta start from the bottom and everybody needs to do an internship in some way, shape, or form to learn what it’s like.
Here are some highlights from Kevin Harvick’s media availability on Friday morning at Phoenix, where he addressed the penalty issued to his team this week.
— On his previous success at Phoenix:
“Nobody wants to talk about that. Let’s just go to the first question. They all have the stats.”
— On whether NASCAR issued a penalty in response to social media posts:
“The car passed all the Optical Scanning Station inspections and everything after the race. The car was built to tolerance. The scary part for me is the fact that (NASCAR) went far enough to find something on the car at the NASCAR R&D Center. They could find something wrong with every car if they took it apart for a whole day at the R&D Center.
“The (incorrect) side skirt material is on us. That rule was put into place Feb. 18 and it should have been aluminum, but ours was steel. That is really kind of the meat of what gave them the ability to actually get the fine to where it was meaningful enough to appease everyone on social media.”
— On social media posts leading to NASCAR’s additional scrutiny:
“If you look at Atlanta, the car was there the week before. Same team, same window bracing, same roof, same side skirts, same everything. It was in the R&D Center the week before (for inspection). It has been there 49 times in three years. Technicalities.”
— On photos of other cars (some from races last year) with similarly dented roofs:
“If we want to officiate it with fan pictures, if you want to officiate it with pictures during the race and call people to pit road and do those types of things — from a NASCAR standpoint. I am fine with that. As long as it is consistent. As you can see from a lot of the pictures roaming around on the internet this week, it is not consistent.”
“You could have called the window attached to the brace penalty on 20 cars last week, easy.”
— On why seven playoff points were taken away if the penalty wasn’t big enough to suspend crew chief Rodney Childers:
“That is the other confusing part about the penalty. If it is such a big deal, why is my crew chief still here? I don’t understand that.”
— On the penalty detracting from the conversation about racing:
“As a sport, you don’t want to be talking about penalties. We are right back to where we were with the LIS machine and all the conversations we had about that. The conversations that went away (because of the new Optical Scanning Station) are now right back into play. We have an encumbered win.”
— On how to stop social media from influencing penalties:
“Keep your executives off of it during the race.”
— On the impact of the penalty:
“It just motivates us. I can’t wait to win another race and jump up and down in victory lane on the back of my car.”
Kevin Harvick’s dominating Las Vegas win was ruled encumbered on Wednesday. Technically it wasn’t “encumbered” because NASCAR got rid of that term in the offseason — but the result is the same.
The No. 4 car’s rear window was not rigid at all times, as the rulebook states it must be, and the rocker arm panel extension was the wrong kind of metal (it is supposed to be aluminum).
So Harvick lost all seven playoff points he earned at Vegas. On top of that, the team also lost car chief Cheddar Smith for two races, Rodney Childers lost $50,000 from his wallet and Harvick lost 20 points in the standings.
That’s a lot of losing, but the team kept the win. NASCAR tradition, right? That’s what they say, anyway. So SHR will cash the check and display the trophy alongside all the others, and Harvick will go down as the winner in the history books.
But I’m not going down that road this time, for a couple reasons.
First, diving back into the same argument over and over is just…exhausting. Second, this instance seems a little different than some of the others.
Harvick’s car has been so fast over the last couple races, it seems hard to believe a dented rear window could have contributed that much speed. Did it help? Probably. Was it the reason he won? Admittedly I have a lack of technical knowledge here, but I would argue no.
Same goes for the rocker arm panel extension. Was having it made out of steel instead of aluminum why Harvick won? Seems highly unlikely.
Still, for the sake of being consistent with my own stance (illegal cars should not win!), I guess NASCAR should probably have taken the victory away.
But…ugh. I just can’t get fired up about this one. In this case, stripping the win would have felt like sending someone to jail for a broken tail light.
I suppose NASCAR had to do something, and the something is better than nothing, but maybe it should come down to either doing nothing or taking away everything.
Otherwise, it feels half-assed, and I’m not sure how outraged we’re all supposed to be here.
