Kevin Harvick’s dislike of Kyle Busch didn’t wane during offseason
Kevin Harvick talks to reporters during the Sprint Media Tour. // Sam Cranston, NASCAR Illustrated
WELCOME, N.C. – A popular topic this week as race teams and drivers meet the media has centered around whether Kyle and Kurt Busch can behave and their impact on the sport.
It’s no secret that Kyle Busch is an unpopular subject for Kevin Harvick.
Harvick has made no secret of his dislike for Kyle, so when asked about the Busch brothers during the Richard Childress Racing stop on the Sprint Media Tour, Harvick didn’t mince words.
“Kyle makes it so easy for everybody not to like him,” Harvick said. “He’s just such a jerk for the most part most of the time. But he does so well in the race car.
“He’s so good with the car and wins races and does all the things, so you wind up with people with a lot of mixed emotions. … He’s really the only guy in the sport, the one guy that I just don’t like.”
Harvick and Busch have feuded heavily in recent years, especially starting with the 2010 season finale at Homestead. That was followed last year by an incident at Darlington, harsh words for each other at Dover and more taunting of each other at Pocono.
Then in November, Busch was suspended for the remainder of the Texas Motor Speedway weekend – both the Nationwide and Sprint Cup events – after wrecking Kevin Harvick Inc. driver Ron Hornaday in the Camping World Truck Series race.
Because of those actions, M&M’s pulled its sponsorship from the Joe Gibbs Racing car for the final two Cup races of the 2011 season.
Harvick isn’t anticipating much of a change in Busch.
“It’s going to go just like it did last year,” Harvick said. “You’re going to go through the first part of the year and everybody is going to make him out to be a saint.
“We’re going to get halfway and he’s going to start not winning as much as he did at the beginning of the year and he’s going to get frustrated and throw a temper tantrum and make an ass out of himself. It’s happened for however many years he’s raced.”
The reasoning of it’s just being competitive doesn’t play with Harvick.
“You can use the competitive excuse for a while, but you can’t use it over and over and over again,” Harvick said. “You’re with one of the most respected groups that there are in the sport and over and over and over, you make them look like fools.”
That doesn’t mean that a driver can’t turn himself around. Harvick believes he has turned around from his days where he got suspended for a Cup race in 2002.
“You can always turn something around and you can always make it right but you just have to not make the same mistake over and over and over,” Harvick said. “Otherwise, it’s kind of like crying wolf. Everybody doesn’t believe you after a while.”
How does one get turned around?
“I think you just grow up, honestly,” Harvick said. “You just get tired of seeing yourself look like a child. I’ve been there. Not to the extreme that he’s been there, but you get tired of seeing yourself in a negative light and you have to learn by your mistakes and you have to move forward.”
As far as Kurt, Harvick said he believes Kurt will have fun rebuilding his career with James Finch and “just got himself in a bad situation and wound up suffering the consequences for it.”
It’s Kyle that Harvick has the problem with. Harvick scoffed at the idea that Kyle’s actions are good for the sport even when they shed poor light on Busch as did the incident with Hornaday.
“What happens if he kills him? Is that headline good for the sport?” Harvick said.
Friends with Ricky Carmichael, who raced for Harvick during the 2009 truck season with the Monster sponsorship, Harvick indicated that Monster is a rare company that would want to partner with someone such as Kyle.
Monster will sponsor the full Nationwide Series season for Kyle and brother Kurt at Kyle Busch Motorsports this year.
“That’s a perfect fit for him,” Harvick said. “They thrive on the same things that he thrives on, and that’s being totally out in right field and doing the types of things that he does. I think those people are starving for press in any way they can get it.
“But how you keep an M&M’s or any of those other people happy, it’s just not going to happen forever. You can only take so much of being the bad guy and people calling you a jerk and going through life like that for so long.”
