● The Atlanta Motor Speedway of today is not the Atlanta Harvick and most of his counterparts grew up knowing. The 1.54-mile oval was reconfigured after the final race of the 2021 season. The banking was increased from 24 degrees to 28 degrees and the track was narrowed from 55 feet wide to 40 feet wide, and it was all covered with fresh asphalt. The goal of the reconstruction was to recreate the kind of pack-style racing seen at the behemoth, 2.5-mile Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway and the even bigger 2.66-mile Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway. NASCAR Cup Series drivers competed on the new layout for the first time in March 2022, where Harvick led 11 laps before finishing 21st. In the series’ return visit to the track last July, Harvick finished 12th. And in Harvick’s most recent drive at Atlanta in March, he finished 33rd after getting collected in an accident.
● Sunday’s Atlanta 400 will mark Harvick’s 36th career NASCAR Cup Series start at Atlanta – the most of any active driver – but only his fourth on the new configuration. In his 32 starts on the old layout, Harvick led the way with a series-high nine top-fives, 16 top-10s (tied with Kurt Busch), 1,348 laps led and 10,127 laps completed. Who is the all-time leader at Atlanta? That’s none other than Richard Petty. They call him “The King” for a reason: 65 career Cup Series starts at Atlanta with six wins, 22 top-fives, 33 top-10s and 1,827 laps led with 17,513 laps completed.
● Harvick is on the cusp of 16,000 laps led in his NASCAR Cup Series career. With his 19 laps led May 29 in the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte (N.C.) Motor Speedway, Harvick’s career tally is 15,999 laps led across 808 Cup Series starts. He is a single lap away from being one of just 11 drivers who have led 16,000 laps in their career. Harvick has led 11,584 laps since joining SHR in 2014 (72.4 percent).
● Harvick’s first NASCAR Cup Series win at Atlanta was the first of his career, and it came 22 years ago on March 11, 2001. The Cracker Barrel Old Country Store 500 was just Harvick’s third race in a Cup Series car. He started fifth in the 325-lap contest and led twice for 18 laps, including the final six. But Harvick had to earn the win on the final lap and hold off a then three-time champion in Jeff Gordon. Harvick succeeded, outdueling the eventual 2001 series champion to take the win by a scant .006 of a second – the seventh-closest finish in NASCAR history.
● Of course, the backstory to that first win is significant. Harvick wasn’t just driving any racecar when he won at Atlanta. He was driving the racecar that less than a month earlier had been piloted by the sport’s titan, Dale Earnhardt. The seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion died on the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500. Team owner Richard Childress tabbed Harvick, who was racing for him in the NASCAR Xfinity Series, to pull double duty and take over Earnhardt’s Cup ride. The No. 3, made iconic by Earnhardt, was changed to the No. 29 and Harvick made his Cup Series debut Feb. 25 at North Carolina Speedway in Rockingham. Harvick started 36th that Sunday at Rockingham, but rain washed over the 1.017-mile oval just 51 laps into the 393-lap race. The race resumed at 11 a.m. ET on Monday, whereupon Harvick drove to a solid 14th-place finish. He then traveled to Las Vegas on Tuesday, married his wife, DeLana, on Wednesday, and was back in a racecar on Friday, competing in both the Xfinity Series and Cup Series events at Las Vegas. After finishing eighth on Sunday to score his first career top-10 in the Cup Series, Harvick headed to Atlanta, where the first of his 60 career Cup Series wins was secured.
● Harvick’s two other NASCAR Cup Series wins at Atlanta came with Stewart-Haas Racing (SHR). In February 2018, Harvick won the Folds of Honor 500. He led eight times for a race-high 181 laps on his way to defeating runner-up Brad Keselowski by an impressive 2.690 seconds. Harvick’s most recent Atlanta victory came in February 2020 in the Folds of Honor 500. Harvick again led the most laps, pacing the field four times for 151 laps en route to an even greater margin of victory – 3.527 seconds over Kyle Busch.
● Harvick is also incredibly good at Atlanta outside of the NASCAR Cup Series. He has five Xfinity Series wins at the track, including four in his last six starts at the 1.54-mile oval, the most recent of which ended in victory – February 2018 when he walloped the field, leading four times for a race-high 141 laps and cruising to the win with a 4.183-second margin over second-place Joey Logano. In 17 career Xfinity Series start at Atlanta, Harvick has 11 top-fives and 13 top-10s with 973 laps led. And in his two NASCAR Truck Series starts at Atlanta, Harvick has a win and a second-place finish. He finished second in his Truck Series debut at Atlanta in March 2009, when he led four times for a race-high 68 laps before coming up .122 of a second short of beating Kyle Busch for the win. But in Harvick’s Truck Series return to Atlanta in March 2010, he dominated by leading twice for a race-high 100 laps and this time besting runner-up Kyle Busch by 1.308 seconds.
● The 2023 season marks the 14th year of partnership between Harvick and Hunt Brothers Pizza. The nation’s largest brand of made-to-order pizza in the convenience store industry has sponsored Harvick for years in the NASCAR Xfinity Series and NASCAR Truck Series. Hunt Brothers Pizza joined Harvick fulltime in the NASCAR Cup Series in 2019 and has been a mainstay in NASCAR’s premier division ever since. With more than 9,000 locations across the country, Hunt Brothers Pizza is the nation’s largest brand of made-to-order pizza in the convenience store industry. Hunt Brothers Pizza offers original and thin crust pizzas available as a grab-and-go Hunk A Pizza®, perfect for today’s on-the-go lifestyle, or as a customizable whole pizza that is an exceptional value with All Toppings No Extra Charge®. Hunt Brothers Pizza is headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, and is family owned and operated. For additional information, visit www.HuntBrothersPizza.com or download the app.
● Said Harvick about his more than decade-long partnership with Hunt Brothers Pizza: “Our fans are pretty loyal to the brands that are on our cars. Many of my pictures come from the standees in the store. People take selfies next to them. There are a number of reasons you have sponsorships – you want that brand recognition, the brand integration. Hunt Brothers Pizza is a very family-oriented company and we’re a very family-oriented group. Those relationships you build through the years with brands that recognize and reflect what you believe in are few and far between. We’ve grown with the Hunt Brothers Pizza brand. They’ve grown with us and have been very loyal to us, and I think our fans are very loyal to Hunt Brothers Pizza. It’s fun to see that brand recognition and that understanding of loyalty and partnership. You realize how many Hunt Brothers Pizza stores there are as you drive to racetracks.”
With three NASCAR Cup Series races on the reconfigured Atlanta Motor Speedway, the new Atlanta really isn’t all that new anymore. How would you describe the current track?
“It’s just a superspeedway race on a mile-and-a-half racetrack. Things just happen a lot faster, so the decisions have to happen faster, the cars move around a lot more, the corners come up a lot quicker. A lot more seat-of-your-pants, just, ‘Go here, go there, do this, do that.’”
What are your expectations for your return to Atlanta this weekend?
“From a driver’s perspective, you hope that the track loses a tremendous amount of grip in a really short amount of time. For me, personally, Atlanta was the racetrack that I always looked forward to every year because of the surface. I understand the surface was at a point where it was a lot of work and needed some change. I’m not sure that everybody wants to run more superspeedway races, but I think it’s exciting and very unique with the mile-and-a-half configuration and things happening so fast. I think everybody’s hoping for a tremendous grip loss in a really short amount of time.”
The first of your 60 career NASCAR Cup Series wins came at Atlanta 22 years ago. How did that race weekend unfold for you?
“We went in and, really for the whole weekend, we were competitive throughout each practice. Atlanta is always one of those places where you just want to keep yourself on the lead lap, and as the race went on, we wound up in a position there at the end of the race where it was myself, Jerry Nadeau, Dale Jr., Jeff Gordon and I believe fifth place was Dale Jarrett. And we just had a heck of a race for the last 25 laps and I think I took the lead three-wide down the front straightaway, which was probably like taboo at the time – racing etiquette was much different. I took the lead and Jeff Gordon had, by far, the fastest car on that particular day, but he somehow wound up a lap down and had to come from the back of the field. I don’t remember much about that particular day other than mixing it up like that, and the only reason I remember is because I’ve seen it so many times. Really, the only things that I remember about that particular day, because there was so much going on in life, in general, at that particular point, you didn’t know whether to be happy or sad. I just got married and there were so many things happening that you were emotionally confused. For me, the things that I remember were coming to the white flag, and the people on the backstretch had climbed up on the fence and I remember coming back the last lap and having to decide top or bottom, and I chose the top and wound up about losing the race because I underdrove the car. But that’s really the only thing that I remember other than, after my burnouts, it was the only race that I remember where the crowd was so loud that you could hear the people screaming and hollering over the engine of the car, and I think that was because everybody was just emotionally confused and people were screaming and they didn’t know whether they should scream because they were happy or sad. It was one of those moments that everybody didn’t expect to be in and there we were. I do remember driving around the track backward and just the people screaming and hollering and hanging on the fence.”
How did that first win at Atlanta change your career?
“Well, everybody kind of already knew your name at that particular point, and I always tell people that things happened backward in my career. They all knew my name first, and then you had to figure out how to earn who you were from that point forward, and then you had to walk everything back in order to be yourself. Everybody knew your name because of Dale’s passing and getting in his car, and then winning the race – that was kind of the moment that solidified the fact that you could do it. And at that point, you did it on the biggest stage because outside of Dale Jr., you had the biggest spotlight shining on you driving that particular car. It was a lot to deal with. Definitely wasn’t ready for all that. Obviously, it solidified the fact that you could drive the car, but dealing with all the things that came after that were difficult because I was 25 and we were just married, and driving home with people standing in your yard, cars parked on your street and everybody knowing where you live, and having to deal with all that was something that we weren’t really ready for.”
Did you feel the magnitude of that win right away, or is it something that time has amplified?
“You look back on it now and you realize the magnitude of all those guys walking out to pit road to congratulate you, and really they understood, or had a better sense of the situation, than I probably did. To get that kind of congratulations from a whole pit road of people is something that shows you the magnitude of the situation. When you look back on it now and you realize what that could have meant in the other direction for your career, it could’ve been catastrophic. But it really was something that, at that moment, kept RCR (Richard Childress Racing) going in the right direction and started to rebuild the process of what it was going to look like over the next decade. You look back on it now, and that was really the start of understanding what your career was going to look like for a while. Now, I look back on it and there are a lot of decisions that I could’ve made a lot better, but it was really a difficult situation that you didn’t even know you were in until you were way done with it.”
You spent 14 years driving for Richard Childress. What does Richard Childress mean to you?
“Richard and I have always had a great relationship because Richard is just a racer. From the very beginning, Richard has run his business by putting competitive cars on the racetrack, and he’s made a living at it. And when we started our company (Kevin Harvick Inc.), I mimicked a lot of the things that Richard did because of the fact that he ran it with a budget and was able to keep his cars competitive. Richard really taught me how to race professionally. He taught me to never quit until the checkered flag, even if you were 100 laps down. It was always about finishing races and putting yourself in the best position possible. You may not have the fastest car, but if you can keep yourself in contention to the end, you would be able to have a chance to win races just by kind of grinding them down. We did that a lot, and it’s really transitioned over from the business standpoint – that never-give-up attitude – and just really how to race. And Richard knows everybody, and that’s really who introduced me to everybody in the industry. He was always very adamant about shaking a hand, putting a name with a face, and being in front of people. So there were definitely a lot of lessons learned there.”
You’re very interested in the business side of the sport. Did that stem from Richard Childress, too?
“Every time I look back at things, Richard played a role in some way, shape or form. Richard was always very supportive, but he would always tell you when you were crossing the line and when he wasn’t happy with something. He always kept it honest, and I think as we went through the years, the business side was always very much centered on Richard knowing what was going on and how you should and shouldn’t do things. When it was right, he was supportive, and when it was wrong, he was honest and he would tell you, so you always knew where you stood.”
Not many athletes announce their retirement and compete for an entire season. How is that going for you?
“Well, we laid out a great plan and tried to cover really everything that we could possibly think of before the season started to really involve everybody and make sure that we tried to be respectful and pay tribute and enjoy each weekend with a different fan base and with a different group of people. There are just so many people that you affect along the way and create relationships with, and so many of those things need to be noticed. Sometimes it’s a handshake, sometimes it’s a picture, sometimes it’s a dinner, whatever it is, sometimes it’s driver intros, a paint scheme or a helmet. We’ve tried to pay respect as much as we can each week to something or somebody or a situation or a moment because, in the end, you’re trying to tell a story for the last 30 years. And let’s face it, half of our fans weren’t here 10 or 15 years ago, let alone 30 years ago, so you’re trying to tell a story of my career and things that have happened, but in the end, behind the scenes there’s a lot that happens. And the thing that I’ve learned, and Tony (Stewart) and everybody at SHR has done a great job in making me realize, is there’s a lot more to it than retiring and saying that you’re done. There are a lot of people who want to be part of it, and there are proper ways to celebrate it and still be competitive. And the thing that sticks out to me is we’ve been competitive every week and had a chance to win a couple of races and run at the front and lead laps and do the things that I’ve wanted to do, and that was to be competitive for my team. I think that’s the most important part, going out on your own terms the last year and try to do what we’ve done the last 22 years on the Cup side and that’s be competitive, and I think that’s the most respectful thing to the fans and the people and the sport, to not just go out there and cash it in but to go out there and to try to win.”
TSC PR
