By Nate Ryan, USA TODAY
KERNERSVILLE, N.C. — Nestled in this sleepy hamlet an hour north of the bustling Charlotte area where many of its rivals are, Kevin Harvick Inc. is outside NASCAR’s hub — and the norm.
Its bright red and beige interiors are a contrast to the oft-drab gray floors and white walls found in most antiseptic stock-car shops. A quote from tennis legend Jimmy Connors (“I hate to lose more than I love to win.”) is framed by black and white lettering in an 18-foot mural above a sprawling shop floor.
Touring the headquarters he designed on a napkin nearly seven years ago, Harvick — who runs KHI with wife, DeLana — stops and smiles.
“We don’t feel we’re like anyone else here,” he says of the only team to field full-time entries in the Nationwide and Camping World Truck series.
Harvick, once parked for bad behavior early in his career, has been called a stock-car iconoclast before, but the roads less traveled now seem to be leading to worthwhile destinations for a Sprint Cup star who also is an emerging power broker.
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His nickname is “Happy,” and it’s never been more applicable than this year. Harvick, 34, is enjoying his finest season in NASCAR’s premier series, notching three wins (bringing his career total to 14, including the 2007 Daytona 500) and leading the standings for 16 consecutive races before Sunday’s Chase for the Sprint Cup opener at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
Harvick has qualified for the Chase, which began in 2004, four times. He notched his highest finish — fourth — in 2006 and 2008.
Though a points reset will put him in third to start the 10-race run to the title, the No. 29 Chevrolet’s season-long consistency has four-time defending champion Jimmie Johnson singling out Harvick as the primary threat to dethrone him — which would bring the first Cup title to Richard Childress Racing since the 1994 crown of Dale Earnhardt (whose 2001 death left a vacancy filled by Harvick).
“It doesn’t matter the track, they have been quick,” Johnson says. “You don’t win a Nationwide championship and the big races he’s won by accident. He has the talent, and the team is doing a great job.”
With a long-term extension at RCR (terms were not disclosed), a new sponsorship deal with Budweiser (at a time when many stars are struggling for funding) beginning next year and his once-fledgling KHI now a burgeoning powerhouse (with a combined 40 Nationwide and truck victories and championships in 2007 and 2009) on NASCAR’s minor-league circuits, Harvick’s future is secure a year after it couldn’t have seemed more cloudy.
During a tumultuous 2009 in which none of RCR’s four cars made the Chase, Harvick publicly feuded with team owner Richard Childress and openly admitted to considering leaving after his contract ended this year. But Harvick has added a dash of diplomacy to the blunt straight talk (“last year was the best thing that ever happened to all of us as far as communicating and knowing how to do things that make each other happy”) while also gaining an appreciation for his boss’ plight through KHI — a workingman’s dream he seems to be shaping in the same mold as RCR.
“If it wasn’t for these teams, I wouldn’t have near as much insight into how the sport functions,” Harvick says. “A lot of these drivers make millions and millions, have fun during the week, and show up on the weekend to just race. But until you see how the economy affects the sport, you don’t respect it near as much. If you’ve got some skin in the game, things change.”
Says ESPN analyst Ray Evernham: “Kevin could always drive a race car. The things that really helped him mature a lot was owning his own cars. You go through that, and you start to understand about everyone else’s world.”
‘He’s always let me be who I am’
Harvick’s first option to leave RCR came shortly after his arrival when Cal Wells offered him a start-up team with a McDonald’s sponsorship (he went as far as being presented a contract while sitting in the corporate offices of the fast-food giant).
“Really, that was the hardest decision I ever had to make,” Harvick says. “They courted me hard. My dad was like, ‘You gotta take this deal, you’re ready.’ So I did the opposite.”
He stayed in part because of the comfort level he had at RCR, dating back to when Childress hired him in 1999 after a rough-and-tumble race at Martinsville.
“I knocked the back bumper off his truck, and that was the reason he said, ‘I like that guy!’ ” Harvick recalls with a laugh. “The first day I worked there, Richard said, ‘If you do something wrong, I’ll tell you. But I want you to talk and dress how you want. I’m not going to make you wear the white, starched shirt and creased pants.’ I can be obnoxious at times, but he’s always let me be who I am.”
Broke after buying out a contract with another team, Harvick had to live on his wife’s credit cards for three months after joining RCR. The pressure didn’t ebb much after winning 2000 Nationwide rookie of the year. Earnhardt’s death thrust Harvick into Cup a season early, but he still won the Nationwide title while finishing ninth as a Cup rookie (including a memorable win at Atlanta in his third race).
The perseverance is endemic to the culture of RCR, which Childress, 64, founded 41 years ago after running moonshine to escape a poverty-stricken upbringing in Winston-Salem, N.C. The team struggled for more than a decade on bare-bones funding before establishing itself with Earnhardt in the 1980s.
“It’s a blue-collar company,” teammate Jeff Burton says. “It’s a hard-working, old-school, get-after-it kind of deal.”
A blue-collar beginning
The style suits Harvick, who grew up the son of a fireman and a high school secretary in Bakersfield, Calif. While his middle-class family supported his career, he also mowed lawns, painted fences and cleaned pools. He worked his way into his first ride, taking a job as a fabricator with owner Wayne Spears’ truck team in hopes of earning a tryout. He did.
“We’re very racer-oriented,” Harvick says of RCR, which also put the Chevys of Burton and Clint Bowyer in the Chase. “We like to have fun and do normal things. We don’t have big yachts. We all have nice things, but if we have a nice house, we like to wear shorts, T-shirt and flip flops. We’re not going to have maids and a lot of crap. It’s just my kind of environment.”
Burton, a 17-year veteran, says he never talked with Harvick about the chances he’d leave but couldn’t envision his teammate going elsewhere.
“A lot of places, I don’t think Kevin’s directness would be met very well,” Burton says. “He’s as expressive today as then, he just says it better. He’s very aggressive about wanting things to be better, and that’s a good thing, but it wouldn’t work everywhere. I looked around and thought ‘What’s a better fit?’
“Kevin still expresses his opinion directly, but he just says it better now. His insistence on making things better is probably a big reason we are.”
It also might be RCR’s location in Welcome, a small town south of Winston-Salem. Similar to KHI, the team center is in what could be considered the NASCAR hinterlands, and turnover is lower than in Charlotte, where crewmembers can push their toolboxes across the street for new work.
Says general manager Mike Dillon, a 25-year employee who’s been Childress’ son-in-law for 22 years: “It’s a family feeling here. We’ve got a lot of employees over 10 and 20 years, and that’s unheard of. We have to go to lunch with ourselves, not with other race teams.”
In 29 years, director of business competition Will Lind has seen RCR survive through NASCAR’s oft-cyclical nature and says team ownership has shown Harvick the same.
“There’s been a hell of a lot of teams come and go since I’ve been here,” Lind says. “Kevin knows how hard it is to keep a group of people focused with a goal. He’s done a great job to start from nothing and have winning trucks and cars.”
KHI success breeds expansion
The 70,000 square feet occupied by KHI in Kernersville isn’t much different from the layout on the napkin that Harvick (who took design classes during a semester of junior college with plans of becoming an architect) handed his wife in their motor home during the 2003 season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
“I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘Our new shop,’ ” says DeLana, 37, who grew up in Kernersville. “That’s how Kevin goes about things. He never stops thinking, and he’s really smart. We call him the Tasmanian Devil. He’s like the big idea guy, and all of us make it happen.”
Now numbering nearly 100 employees, KHI started in 2001 in a 1,000-square-foot building with a staff of three. The original building, since expanded, now is being remodeled as a fabrication shop to handle a flourishing side business of supplying trucks to several teams — a revenue stream that’s helped make KHI profitable while giving Harvick more clout with NASCAR on the direction of the series that launched his career.
“We have our hand in the cookie jar in a lot of different areas,” he says. “But I like the sport and want to support it. I could have easily said, ‘Truck racing is going to cost a little bit of money.’ But I feel like it got me where I’m at.”
Harvick and his wife (who posted the shop’s Connors quote) oversee the team’s day-to-day operations while living on 140 acres in nearby Oak Ridge, eschewing the lakefront mansions in Mooresville where many drivers reside.
“I don’t like Mooresville just from the fact you see the same people week in and week out on the road,” he says. “You go to dinner and everybody’s up in your business. Up here, we just relax. And with the business side, you don’t have someone walking across the street for a $10 raise. We’ve wound up with a very good core group of people that are very loyal.”
One is general manager Rick Carelli, a former truck racer who has known Harvick since Harvick was 5. Several have been with the team since its inception.
Their trust has allowed Harvick, with encouragement of others, to branch into hobbies for the first time, as well as start a foundation for children’s charities. During last year’s NHL season, he had an 8-0 record of attending Philadelphia Flyers’ games through Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals (and has had center Jeff Carter as a guest at races).
In the past eight months, he has taken up golf, becoming a member of Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro and befriending PGA player Jason Gore, who stayed at the Harvicks’ house during a recent PGA event.
For Harvick (who notes “everything about golf is opposite from what I do on the track”), it’s another way to be not like anyone else.
“We’re trying to broaden my horizons,” he says, laughing. “Life is not all about racing. That’s hard to realize when it’s all you want to do. But it’s easy. You just hang out. It’s been a great release … and I like to beat my own path.”