To ease the pressure of his Cup, Nationwide and team ownership responsibilities, Kevin Harvick doesn’t hop a plane to the Caribbean or disappear into a tricked-out media room. Instead, he slips out the back door of his house and trots across the yard.

There, tucked away in a stand of pine trees, is his refuge.

Hee Haw Speedway, a tiny asphalt oval that Harvick and his neighbor built for kart racing, gives the 32-year-old driver a chance to click off lap after lap, focusing only on the next turn.

“I go out there during the winter,” Harvick says. “Not for very long because someone hears you and comes down, but I’ve been out there by myself, made hundreds of laps, just riding around.”

On days like that, Hee Haw is Harvick’s sanctuary.

“You can get away from the phone and all the stuff that we have going on,” he says. “That’s the best part: just going down to the shop and working on the karts.”

Despite its silly name, racing at Hee Haw is no laughing matter. When Harvick plays host to his racing mates — fellow professional racers, Kevin Harvick Inc. employees, a handful of neighbors — Hee Haw Speedway changes character. With as many as 20 karts clogging the sixth-of-a-mile oval, banging into one another, the track’s friendly moniker can seem like a bad joke. On race nights, “Thunderdome” or “Mini-Monster Mile” might be more appropriate.

“It usually turns into the roughest short track race that you can watch,” Harvick says. “We call it a redneck rodeo.”

Drivers who’ve experienced races at the track — and even Harvick himself — invariably use the word “wreckfest” to describe races at Hee Haw.

But in the same breath, they stress that while fiberglass fenders might get torn up and karts might get wrecked, the racers never get bent out of shape. At least, not for long.

“We’re all out there for fun,” Harvick says. “But it can get away from everyone, for a brief moment, that you’re actually just in your backyard racing. Sometimes, it just turns into a race.”

Hee Haw Speedway came to be four years ago. Harvick was building a new house, and his contractor, Kevan Combs, just happened to be his neighbor too. Combs, a successful real estate developer, hit it off with Harvick right away.

Despite growing up in North Carolina, Combs had no experience in racing. So, Harvick, who got his first kart when he graduated kindergarten, gave Combs a taste of the action. The two gathered some friends, packed up a few karts and drove to the parking lot of an empty Burlington Industries plant.

In his first session behind the wheel, Combs got a heck of an introduction to racing.

“The brakes in his kart went out and he went shooting across a public road,” Harvick says. “Luckily, there were no cars coming. He didn’t know that all he had to do was crank the wheel to the left and spin it out. He just went straight until he stopped.”

But Combs emerged from the brush on the other side of the road a changed man.

“I had so much fun with the guys,” he says. “I was just completely addicted.”

After a few more trips to the parking lot and even a run or two on Sprint Cup driver Clint Bowyer’s private dirt track, Harvick and Combs realized they could do all this in their backyard.

“When we were finishing up construction of his house,” Combs says, “I thought, ‘Well, I’m a real estate developer, I build roads and stuff, so I have the means to build a track.’ And we just marked out a track. Kevin and Rick Carelli [GM, KHI] helped with the design. It just evolved from there.”

With Harvick’s expertise and Combs’ connections, the track went from idea to reality in a matter of days. (They found the best land behind Combs’ house so technically, Hee Haw is on his property and not Harvick’s.)

“We wanted an oval, so we took what Clint had on his dirt track and made the corners sharper so you couldn’t carry so much speed,” Harvick says. “Then, we took some measurements, decided on eight degrees of banking and that’s about it. We laid it out with a tape measure and a can of spray paint and stuck some stakes in the ground.

“Two days later, it was paved.”

Complete with lighting for night racing and even official Whelen caution lights, Hee Haw is surprisingly polished despite its small size.
It’s so small that Harvick measures the track’s length in feet, not in fractions of a mile.

“It’s 185 feet from the top of each corner to the other corner and there’s 20 feet from bottom to bottom on each straightaway,” he says.
That makes it roughly a sixth of a mile — but it looks like it could fit in most high school gyms.

That doesn’t mean they don’t go fast. Harvick estimates that karts break 50 mph on the straights. Despite the fact that they are turning nearly all the time, Harvick and the elite kart racers get around Hee Haw Speedway in less than six seconds. In a race, lap times in the 5.9-second range are the benchmark.

“It’s a rhythm track,” Harvick says. “You just need to get your kart turning well enough that you can get to the center of the corner and be wide open. Because the straightaways are so short you want to make them as long as you can.”

So, what does Harvick get out of racing on a pocket-sized track with single-digit horsepower?

Plenty.

“It’s really good training for your neck and shoulders,” he says. “It’s so fast and it’s pulling on your head so much, you really can’t simulate that in the gym.”

He’s not kidding. All the drivers on Hee Haw Speedway must wear neck restraints — webbing harnesses that loop around their left shoulder and clip to their helmet — to keep their head upright during races.

Even after weathering more than 20 races at Hee Haw, Cale Gale, a KHI Craftsman Truck and Nationwide Series driver, still wakes up with a sore neck.

“The hardest part is just keeping your neck strong,” Gale says. “We wear neck restraints, but it still seems to end up laying over by the end of the race.”

And rookies? Good luck.

“If you come out there for the first time,” Harvick says, “most can’t make 20 laps without their neck giving out.”

Gale also thinks that races at Hee Haw have enhanced his reflexes.

“Stuff happens so fast on that little track that when something happens on a real track, your hand-eye coordination is ready,” he says. “Hee Haw keeps you real smooth. A kart’s never fast if you’re jerking the steering wheel around, so it helps you out with that.”

While racing at his private track might make him a better racer, Harvick has enjoyed watching the local amateurs catch on. He glows with pride when he talks about the progress his neighbors have made.

Combs is the most dramatic success story.

“He didn’t know anything about racing when we started,” Harvick says. “He’s gone from absolutely horrible to being really good.”

Combs has also expanded his repertoire, running late models at some of the smaller Carolina tracks.

But all of Harvick’s colleagues have improved. Brandon Pierce, a 13-year-old from the neighborhood has cut his lap times from 10-plus to just over six seconds.

Unfortunately, the improvements don’t always come just from refined technique. Harvick and Combs have learned how difficult managing a race league — even one as casual as this — can be.

“The first thing that happened was people started driving through the dirt on the bottom, so we added the curbs on the inside,” Harvick says.

Then, they added some rumble strips at the top of the straightaways to keep karts off the grass.

“We thought the rumble strips would slow everyone down,” Combs says, “but instead, it sped everyone up because it allowed them to get a better arc in the corner and they have better bite in the concrete. So, in an attempt to slow them down, we actually sped them up.”

“At one point,” Harvick says, “we epoxied the inside of the track but that took rubber and made it faster. Since then, we’ve decided just to stop messing with it.”

Meanwhile, the karts have changed too. What once was a stock league now features highly customized karts purpose-built for racing at Hee Haw.

And it all started with one racer’s visit.

A few years ago, Harvick’s good friend and fellow Cup driver Tony Stewart came out to the annual Fall Brawl at Hee Haw Speedway.
“Stewart came the first time with the super-motor, the super-gear, the jackshaft, and from that point on, everyone just got out of hand,” Harvick says.

Stewart won the event and sent everyone else in search of faster karts.

Harvick recently decided to put an end to the arms race.

“We just bought 18 spec motors so everyone will have the same motor,” he says. “And we’re instituting a gear rule and a weight rule.”
Everyone who races at Hee Haw also uses the same tire — a Burris 55A that Harvick buys from Mike Burris, a veteran kart competitor on the West Coast. Finally, in a concession to the neighbors who don’t race — or, at least, don’t want to hear it — all of the karts run silencers.

But no matter how advanced the karts may get or how spirited the competition, Harvick and Combs try not to lose sight of the reason they built Hee Haw Speedway in the first place: to have fun.

On race night, the atmosphere resembles a picnic more than a race. Hot dogs, ribs and hamburgers sizzle on a grill while racers’ kids and wives watch from blankets.

“It’s still fun to go out there and relax,” Harvick says. “We just go out there and turn it into an event. Everybody gets away from everything for four or five hours.”

Trophy Case

Bragging rights are usually the only stakes for a race at Hee Haw Speedway. In fact, most drivers are happy just to leave with their karts in one piece.

But for the Fall Brawl, an annual autumn race that usually draws over 20 drivers, an actual trophy is on the line.

“The first trophy was just an old racing trophy that someone had given us,” Kevin Harvick says. “We used a piece of duct tape to cover up the year to make it a current trophy. The rule was whoever won had to bring the trophy back so the trophy rotated.”

But, Tony Stewart, who changed racing at Hee Haw with his souped-up kart, also defied tradition at the Fall Brawl.

“We had used that old trophy for two years but Stewart won, took that trophy and hasn’t brought it back,” Harvick says. “So we had to get a new trophy for the Fall Brawl.”

After it was clear the old trophy wasn’t coming back, Stewart and Harvick discussed the matter on Stewart’s Sirius Satellite Radio show. A listener came up with the solution.

“A lady that listens to Stewart’s show on the radio built us a new trophy out of Schlitz Beer cans,” Harvick says. “That’s now the trophy for the Fall Brawl. The cans are all dented — it’s awesome. Jason Meeks [car chief of the Kevin Harvick Inc. No. 33] won it. But he’ll have to bring it back this fall.”

This article first appeared in the July 2008 issue of NASCAR Illustrated.