We’re still a month away from the Sprint Cup season beginning, but Sundays are still race days for me during the offseason. I host a go-kart race every week on the track in my backyard using the same 1 p.m. start time as NASCAR (the only difference is we don’t have to travel as far to get behind the wheel). We start at 1 p.m. because we don’t want to make the church across the street mad at us. We had to put mufflers on them five years ago because the neighbors behind us really didn’t like us because the noise was such a nuisance. Everything is good now.
As long as it’s above 30 degrees, we’re usually racing, but we’ve raced in the rain and the snow before, too. We have fun. There are usually between 10 to 20 go-karts each weekend, and a lot of guys from the race shops come. We’ve had some drivers, too, such as Denny Hamlin, Bobby Labonte, Martin Truex Jr. and Clint Bowyer. You never know who’s going to show up.
This will be the fifth year in a row we have people over just to hang out and race go-karts on the Thursday night before the NASCAR events at Martinsville. The first is known as the Spring Fling; the other is the Fall Brawl. We have trophies for both races that have been made out of beer cans and old go-kart tires.
We used to have a traveling trophy for the winner until Tony Stewart won it a few years ago and never brought it back. We had so much fun that night, Tony and I decided to call Chip Ganassi at 2 or 3 in the morning because he always answers his phone. Chip’s always an entertaining conversation, even when you wake him up in the middle of the night.
Kevin Harvick talks about the characteristics of the new pavement at Daytona International Speedway and the racing it should produce.
The go-kart track isn’t just a good time, but it’s also useful to my NASCAR career because it keeps my neck in shape during the offseason. You’re running 6-second laps at about 50 mph on an asphalt track with 8 degrees of banking (it’s 185 feet from the top of each corner to the other). The G-forces are pulling on your neck just like they would in a Sprint Cup car. It’ll wear you out. There’s nothing you can do in the gym for that, so the go-kart is the best preparation.
We had a good three-day test last week at Daytona International Speedway. The first day we had trouble with parts failures and just getting back into the swing of things with the No. 29 Budweiser Chevrolet. We stayed an extra day, and the team worked their butts off to get the car where it needed to be. It felt good to be back at the track. Anytime you go to Daytona, it’s just a different feeling because you know you’re preparing for the biggest race of the year. You want everything to be right. Every little detail matters.
I feel good about where we’ll be when they drop the green flag for the Bud Shootout and Daytona 500. The test showed that the two-car drafts common at Talladega are going to work at Daytona. I watched a lot of it happen over the three days. The Richard Childress Racing cars always draft really well. We’ve had speed in qualifying, too. I’ve emphasized qualifying because it’s going to be a lot tighter packs than we’re used to at Daytona, and you don’t have the room to move around that you do at Talladega. I want to be at the front of the pack.
Two cars can break away just as at Talladega. It’ll be interesting to see with the new asphalt how the pack forms, and if a single-file line forms at some point. Or if there’s constantly two or three lines because the track is so much narrower than Talladega. The biggest difference is the transitions in and off the corners and in and out of the tri-oval — they are a little more abrupt than Talladega. I think if you’re going to have two lines, it’s going to be hard to have two cars pull together and drive through the middle. You don’t have the luxury of having all that extra room to work with the width of the racetrack like at Talladega.
We didn’t do any drafting at the test, because we want to have three well-prepared cars, and the first thing that happens is the rear bumper gets knocked off. Then the front bumper gets knocked off. The tolerances are so tight on the templates that when you start knocking the rear bumper off and the spoiler starts to come down, then you have to put a rear clip and rear bumper back on, and those things take time. They already have spent hours and hours detailing the cars. Now we can take them back and put them in final preparation.
I’ll be attending the Super Bowl as a guest of Budweiser, and I’m picking Green Bay. I think I might have misled some people on Twitter because I said liked the Packers — meaning as the winner. I was just making a statement because many followers asked which team I thought would win. I’m not a Packers fan by any means. I’m a 49ers fan, so I haven’t had a whole lot to root for the last few years.