Kevin Harvick says he still won’t consider driving in the Cup series in car he owns
NASCAR Nationwide and Camping Truck series team owner Kevin Harvick says there's no owner/driver role in his future. // David Griffin, NASCAR Scene
MIAMI BEACH, Fla. – As he prepares to determine where he will drive in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series in 2011, Kevin Harvick says he hasn’t changed his mind about possibly driving in the series for himself. He just won’t do it.
Harvick’s contract with Richard Childress Racing ends after the 2010 season, and as early as last July Harvick gave indications that he was seriously considering leaving RCR, saying that he was focused on the present when asked about the future.
About the only thing Harvick knows for sure about 2011 is that he won’t drive for himself.
“I don’t have any intentions of driving for myself,” Harvick said Monday while discussing plans for Kevin Harvick Inc., which will celebrate the 2009 Camping World Truck Series title of Ron Hornaday tonight at the joint Nationwide and Truck series awards banquet. “At the Truck and Nationwide level, you can still drive it and own it. It is just so much more intense on the Cup side.
“I just don’t know that you could separate everything all the time, whether it’s a financial decision, whether it’s a business decision, whether it’s a performance decision. You have all these decisions that an owner-driver has. It’s hard to separate those two when you’re sitting at the competition meeting saying, ‘All right, from a driver standpoint, you want to do it this way; from a business standpoint you need to do it this way.’ So where is that line between performance and business when you’re sitting at that table? That’s a lot harder to draw when you have a $2 million or $3 million decision. A $200,000 or $300,000 decision is a lot different than that.”
Harvick said his company, which has won the Truck title in two of the last three years with Hornaday behind the wheel,
would need the perfect scenario to compete in the Cup series in the future.
“I see how much work it is on Sunday from the driver’s seat,” he said. “You can see how much work it is to keep these programs running on the Nationwide and Truck side. I really enjoy being able to be a part of the programs and [being] a part of the people.
“When you get to Cup, it becomes so big that you can’t be a part of everything. I better be done driving by that point because it’s a full-time job for an owner to be a Cup owner. On top of that, you need millions and millions of dollars to get your program started. It would have to be the 100 percent right situation from a sponsor standpoint, from a manufacturer standpoint [and] you’d have to have a good alliance with somebody. If all those things were lined up, you would have to sit and weigh out the options if I was still driving.”
The KHI plan for next season is to run two full-time Trucks and one full-time Nationwide car with the possibility of a second car in select races. Hornaday will drive one truck while Harvick will drive the other along with Cup drivers in the companion events to Cup races and another driver for non-companion events, Harvick said. Harvick also plans to split time with Hornaday (four or five races), Ryan Newman and possibly others in the Nationwide car.
