Kevin Harvick says timing and sponsorship could lure Kevin Harvick Inc. to Cup
Kevin Harvick doesn’t know if or when Kevin Harvick Inc. would become a NASCAR Sprint Cup team, but Harvick will be ready if the right time – and the right sponsor – comes for his organization to make that step.
Harvick admits the time could be soon, especially considering the current economic climate and the merging of several teams leaving the door open for a young program to make races and establish itself.
“You’re going to see some people come into the sport because it's an opportunity to try to get your Cup team started and try to make it work,” Harvick says.
Do those people include KHI, which has competed in the Truck series since 2002 and in Nationwide since 2004?
"You never can say no,” Harvick says. “I don't have any interest in driving my own car, I know that for sure, but I think it's something that you always think about."
If Harvick and his wife, DeLana, do opt to go Cup racing, they will keep the same philosophy they've used in building their organization. They won’t field a program unless it has funding. Harvick did run some Truck races during the organization’s first year just to get the company off the ground but has resisted the urge to field a car without financial support.
That has been part of Harvick’s success. KHI has 17 wins and the 2007 title in Trucks as well as three wins in Nationwide.
“It’s just going to take the right opportunity to get in [to Cup] from a sponsorship standpoint,” Harvick said. “I think the Trucks and the Nationwide cars have built a foundation for us to do that if the right opportunity ever came about.
“With the people and our shop – all the things are there to do it. It just has got to be timing and I’m not going to do something that is not right [with sponsorship]. Right now, you might have to beef a couple of things up but the foundation is laid for all that stuff.”
For now, Harvick will listen to potential opportunities while also making sure that KHI continues to be run frugally.
“[We’re] just making sure that we're competitive in the market, to put a competitive, affordable program together for our sponsors,” Harvick said. “I think that's probably the biggest thing we've done is adjust a little bit there on pricing.
“When you do that, it effects all the way down and that's how many people you have, how much you're paying for hotel rooms, and it goes from all the way down to the bottom to make sure when you lower that price, you've got to lower your overhead.”
Harvick has watched what has happened to other teams in the garage. He has seen traditional teams such as Dale Earnhardt Inc., Bill Davis Racing and Petty Enterprises merge and virtually lose their identity.
Watching those traditional owners struggle is not a deterrent to owning a Cup team for Harvick.
“From a DEI and a Petty circumstance, you’ve kind of seen the deterioration of those teams coming and this was just the final straw that broke the camel’s back,” Harvick says. “From the outside looking in, I look at opportunity. That’s how we’ve always approached things.”
Those opportunities in this day and age of Cup racing include interested investors in race teams.
“A hedge-fund guy is probably not going to be the right guy to come in the sport,” Harvick says. “The solid owners are the ones who are racers and those are the kind of things that we need in our sport.”
But even a racer such as Richard Childress has an investor, and Chartwell Investments gave Childress the financial means to expand his shop and revitalize his team.
Childress didn’t relinquish control and still is the face of the race team. If Harvick had to stomach and take an investor, it likely would have to be in a fashion similar to that of Childress. Harvick doesn’t seem too interested in going Cup racing if he isn’t in control of the team.
“Everything that we’ve done, we’ve done on our own in our particular organization,” Harvick says. “Cup racing is expensive, but I would hate to give up something that I built. I wouldn’t give up any control. I wouldn‘t do it.”
