KEVIN HARVICK, No. 4 Ford Fusion
DOES IT SEEM LIKE A LITTLE BIT OF A DISCONNECT THAT ALL THE YOUNG GUYS ARE GETTING ALL THE PROMOTION FROM NASCAR RIGHT NOW AND YOU GUYS AREN’T? “Well, you know. I guess it depends on how you look at it. I have had all I can handle to do on all of that side of things with everything that we have going on from a promotional standpoint with sponsors and commercials and things like that. Our sponsors have done a great job of being active and activating and doing all the things they do. In the end, results on the race track are what makes it go around. There is no better way to look at that than to look at Danica and the trouble they had with sponsorship and things they worked on. You had the ultimate marketing tool right there. In the end, performance is going to matter at some point. You look at the Championship 4 … you can add the age up.”
QUESTION INAUDIBLE: “You know, this is a conversation that I had with her. I had 20 years on her when she started in a stock car. That is experience and the things that come with that, you are never going to make up that ground. As long as I am still racing, I am going to be 20 years ahead regardless. I think it never is going to be easy to go from one to another if you are going to be at the top level of that sport for a long time because the cars are … I have never driven an IndyCar but based on everything I have heard the characteristics and how you drive them are 180-degrees different. It has been very hard for a lot of the open wheel guys to come over here and drive these 3,600 pound cars. It is the total opposite of everything they have been taught their whole lives. A lot of the kids we have coming up through our ranks now have been in stock car since they were 12 or 13 years old. It is much different. I think you have to pick a path. If you want to race open-wheel cars and do those things it is probably going to be carts and into an open wheel series. There are very few people that have been able to do them both. Tony Stewart and Montoya have done it the best in my opinion. Might be somebody else I am missing. But there have been a lot that have tried.”
THERE IS A 40-YEAR OLD QUARTERBACK DOING PRETTY WELL. DO YOU HAVE ANY THOUGHTS ON WHAT IT TAKES TO MAINTAIN THAT COMPETITIVE LEVEL AFTER THE AGE OF 40 AND WHAT KIND OF RESPECT YOU HAVE FOR WHAT HE HAS BEEN ABLE TO DO. “I think as you look at age it is different when you get into football or baseball because you are so dependant on your body to do things. Obviously we do a lot of things to keep ourselves healthy but you are not 100% dependant on having the strongest arm or run the fastest. When you look at the longevity that Brady has been able to have, it is just a lot of talk about the age and I think the one thing that you see about experience, and Peyton Manning is a good one to look back to. Look at that team since he has been gone. The next year they had pretty much the same defense and same things but there is something about that experience and being able to relate to those experiences and the things you have done in the past and being able to relate those things to guys that haven’t been in those situations before. It helps you kind of keep things from going down a path that they don’t need to go down because you have seen those types of things happen. Being able to do that in the NFL is a little bit different just for the fact that you are so dependant on your body. Obviously he is doing a good job taking care of himself. Still, when you look at Belichick and Brady and the preparation and how many different people and players they have had in and out through the years of changing things, it says a lot about their preparation and things they do.”
INAUDIBLE: “You haven’t heard us talk about that. We have a car that is designed for a huge spoiler in the back and is the oldest car on the race track compared to the other manufacturers. It took us a little bit to get things situated last year with the balance. We could face those balance issues again this year that we might have to work through as we go into the year just because of the way they are going to inspect the cars with the Hawkeye system. With the new splitter rules you are looking at a few hundred pounds of downforce taken off the cars. There are no rule changes but everybody had to be cut off in every shop. It is different. I think that much like the pit guns, I look at the splitter in that same category. There has been a tremendous amount of money spent on development of the shapes of the splitter. We could be in a position to where we have some balance issues with the race car but if we are going to have a problem at SHR and we put it on our aero department, I will put that up against anybody. We may come out of the box great but you don’t really know until you get to the race track. We worked through those issues last year. It took us a bit but we might have to work at them again.”
ARE CREW CHIEFS RUNNING OUT OF PLACES WHERE THEY CAN WORK? “Not when I walk through the shop. All we do is work on everything. I don’t see that at all. There are so many things you can do. It is unbelievable the amount of things that get talked about and changed and worked on and the engineering departments in these race teams are pretty remarkable. When you think they are out of things they will think of 1,000 new things they can tinker with.”
IS RACING SIMILAR TO OTHER SPORTS WHERE COACHES SAY MORE GAMES ARE LOST THAN WON. DO YOU LOSE MORE RACES THAN YOU WIN? “Absolutely. We won two races last year. We ran 38. We screwed up in 36 of them somehow, some way. There are definitely situations you think you could have capitalized on and I have won races that I shouldn’t have won if you are basing that on the fastest car. The fastest car is usually not going to win the race because so many things come down to strategy and situations and cautions. There are so many things involved in winning a race that you look back at 2014, 2015, 2016 and there are so many situations that you say if that caution flag didn’t come out there then we could have won this many races. That is just not how it works. That is what makes sports great in general. You were probably watching that Vikings vs. Saints game the other night. Everybody thought that was over. Including the other team.”
“We have had conversations but for me it really doesn’t change anything. I am going to get the car in the box and do the things I do in the race car. I will just sit there a little longer. You have to remember I have sat there for 22-second pit stops too. I have been on both sides of this thing where the pit stops didn’t really matter and then they were something everyone was focused on. When I started, a pit stop was 22 to 24-seconds.”
DO YOU EXPECT ANY OUTSIDE THE BOX STRATEGY? “I think it will evolve like everything else. I think there will be some teams that do some things that other teams didn’t think about and by the time we get halfway through the year it will be the new norm. Everybody at our place was up in arms about how heavy the pit gun was and taking the guys away on pit road and I was like, ‘Who cares?’ It is going to be the new normal eventually. Pretty soon you don’t talk about it anymore because it isn’t even a story. So just start practicing.”
LAST YEAR AT HOMESTEAD, THE FINAL FOUR DRIVERS WERE ASKED TO DESCRIBE THE SEASON AND TWO OF THE FOUR OF YOU SAID, ‘LONG’. IS THERE SOMETHING YOU WOULD DO TO THE SCHEDULE? “Do you really want to get me started on schedules? The season is long. I don’t mind the long season but the one thing I do like about this season is the fact that the schedule is changing. You see Richmond in the playoffs and Indy in a date where the fans can sit in the stands and not burn their rear ends off. You see the Charlotte road course. It is just like the road course, if we don’t ever run it again, think about all the conversation that it has created. If you did it every year, it would just be another race. Those are the types of things that we need to create. We need to create events and moments. There needs to be a rotation of the championship race. I don’t think we should go to Homestead-Miami every year. I think it gets stale. It is a great race track but it isn’t all about the race track. It is about the event. How many times have you had a crappy Super Bowl but everybody goes to the Super Bowl because it is an event. That is what we need to create. I love that we are starting to mix it up. I think we need to mix it up more. Going to Vegas to kick off the playoffs is a good move from a market standpoint. It is a great race track but the market itself is something you have to pay attention to. If you go to places and the market is stale, I think all these race tracks should have the opportunity to have one race in the playoffs. I think there is an opportunity to maybe have a wildcard race. When you have all these renovations and things happening, maybe you give that track the opportunity. You renovate your race track, then you have the right to take your date and lease it to someone else during the renovation process so that you can go try new markets and you can go have a unique event. Then that gives that particular race track a grace period to get all the work done and not have a race so they can keep working and get the renovations done in a shorter amount of time. That allows you to keep the race tracks renovated and still make money off their race by working a deal out with another race track with their sanctioning agreement. I think there are things there that you could get creative and really mix it up. People don’t like the same thing. You have to keep their attention. It can’t just be about the cars racing on the race track and if you have to have a good race. They are not all going to be good. If you make the schedule exciting and make the events exciting, that is what guarantees you the people to come back if they had a good time. If you have a good race on top of it, great. It is kind of like a sponsorship. You have sponsorships that activate and sponsorships that don’t activate. The ones that activate are usually going to be around longer than the ones that don’t because of the fact that they get more return on their dollar and are more involved in what they do and it isn’t just a car on the track.”
DO YOU THINK ONCE WE GO THROUGH THIS SCHEDULE TWEAKING ONCE THAT IT WILL OPEN SOME EYES WITH NASCAR AND THE TRACK OWNERS? “I think everyone is reluctant to go in and really mix it up because of the sanctioning agreements and agreements that the tracks have. I think if you could work something out to where you could take your date and lease it to someone else but you are still in charge of that date and do that on occasion, those would help create those unique events. I think this year we have mixed it up and hopefully that is a sign of things to come in the future with the schedule. The schedule just became a little bit stale. We have had a lot of changes this year and I think this is the first year we have seen all those things come into play and you have the Charlotte road course and Las Vegas and Richmond in the playoffs. That first round is totally different. There is nothing the same about that. It should be better for you guys, right? You have something guaranteed to write about no matter what is happening in the sport. If you get the results that come out of that that happen to be an extraordinary moment, then that is icing on the cake. We need to create more of our own headlines like that, that are slam dunks.”
KYLE BUSCH WAS CRITICAL EARLIER TODAY OF WHAT HE FEELS IS AN IMBALANCE OF THE MARKETING OF YOUNG DRIVERS. DO YOU SEE IT THAT WAY? “That is like the child that is whining for some attention. Look, I can’t complain about that because of the fact that our sponsors have been so involved with the things we do. NASCAR has been very open to the things that they are doing and involving us in. So, I can’t back that up to be honest with you. You have to have a push for the younger generation guys as well in order to help introduce them to the fans and in the end that only works if they have the success on the race track. There has to be a push for the guys coming up to introduce them to who they are. If they happen to perform like they need to perform on the race track and start acquiring some of the race fans that are looking for a driver to support, that is good for everybody. Chase Elliott winning a race would be good for everybody. I think he hasn’t done that in two years. There is a lot of hype and he has been very competitive but I can promise you that every person in that garage should be happy for the sport when Chase Elliott wins a race because he is big for our sport.”
NASCAR TURNS 70 NEXT MONTH. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE GENERAL HEALTH OF THE OLD FELLA? “Man, that makes me feel old. I won the NASCAR West championship on the 50th anniversary. You know, I think our sport is a lot like any other sport in the world. I think as you look at this transition of generational change of drivers and look at the growth of the sport that we went through in the late ‘90’s and early 2000’s, it is changing. I think we have made a lot of good changes to the sport and as we create and keep creating a better model for the teams to hopefully achieve some financial stability with the things that they need to get the coast of everything into something that is sustainable, I think that is a good thing. That is a tough question because you still look at the TV ratings and it still compared to all the other sports and TV in general they are all right in the same realm of where they used to be. Everybody is lower. There are so many different ways to measure how people are watching things nowadays. It isn’t as big as it was in 2006, but it is also still really big. You are going to go to the Daytona 500 and still have 100,000 fans in the grandstands and when they talk about attendance being down, there are still 80,000 people sitting up there. It is all relative.”
YOU SEEM TO ENJOY YOUR RADIO SHOW, HOW DO YOU THINK THAT FITS INTO YOUR FUTURE AFTER YOUR DRIVING CAREER? “I think as you look at the radio show in general, I would rank it as one of the top-three most successful things we have done to relate to the fans. The second thing that it did was help control the factual message of some things that were happening in the sport and help deliver some ideas and things that were thoughts. I ran the K&N West race and we had the Will Rogers kid on the show and now I see he has some opportunities to run in ARCA and he got a lot of exposure. We had some people that liked NASCAR like Charlie Daniels and Guy Fieri and a bunch of these different people interested in our sport and we introduced them to our fans. The main thing of focus for myself and Matt (Yocum) was to make sure it was fair. This was supposed to be about helping be a part of the sport and not be a production for the 4 car and Stewart-Haas Racing. You needed to be willing to criticize yourself and everybody else and be willing to say what you feel and I have always been willing to say that. It is better for me to say it on Tuesday than it is on Sunday after the race. You can give a very honest opinion on Tuesday and deliver it correctly without just making a complete ass out of yourself.”
WILL IT CONTINUE THIS YEAR? “Oh yeah.”
ANY DREAM GUESTS? “Man, that is a good question. We had a pretty good cast of characters. You will have to keep listening I guess.”
