The Man in White

Much about Harvick recalls his predecessor

Kevin Harvick won two races during his rookie campaign. M. David Leeds/Allsport

By Pete McEntegart, Sports Illustrated

He is all about winning championships. Just ask any female from the Class of ’93 at North High in Bakersfield, Calif. Any of those young women who hoped to make Kevin Harvick her escort for the senior prom knew it was hopeless. Harvick wasn’t opposed to dating, mind you; it’s just that the prom took place on a weekend, and on weekends, as everyone knew, the only place you found Harvick was at Bakersfield’s Mesa Marin Speedway, gunning for the track’s late-model championship.

So while his classmates were donning tuxes, renting limos and pinning on boutonnieres, Harvick was earning vital points toward the all-important trophy. “We won the track championship that year,” Harvick says. “and that definitely was more important than going to the senior prom.”

That insatiable hunger for hardware explains Harvick’s answer when asked what meant more: completing one of the best rookie seasons in Winston Cup history, under some of the most trying of circumstances, or winning the 2001 Busch series title. “Finishing in the top 10 in the Winston Cup looks a lot more beneficial financially,” says Harvick, who finished ninth in the Cup standings after taking over Dale Earnhardt’s ride in the wake of the Man in Black’s fatal crash at Daytona. “But there’s only one Busch Grand National trophy a year. That’s all anyone can get. I race for the trophy.”

That drive also explains why Sports Illustrated is predicting that Harvick will walk Earnhardt’s footsteps in another respect: following a rookie of the year award with the points championship, as the young Earnhardt did in 1980. The 25 year-old Harvick, blond and baby-faced, possesses the controlled aggression that was the stamp of his predecessor.

This season Harvick ruffled more than a few feathers with his occasionally paint-trading path to the front (witness his bump-and-grind with Ricky Rudd in the fall Richmond race). Yet Harvick also knows when to hold back to avoid the wrecks that spell doom for a championship run. Combine that with a proven organization led by owner Richard Childress (who won six Winston Cup titles with Earnhardt) and crew chief Kevin Hamlin, and Harvick emerges as next year’s best bet to unseat Jeff Gordon. “I’ve seen a lot of great young drivers,” Childress says. “Kevin has the ability to be a champion. He can be one of the greatest.”

Harvick’s sudden transformation from virtual unknown to championship contender might never have happened were it not for a few juicy steaks. One night in 1991, while dining at a restaurant in San Rafael, Calif., with his wife, Judy, Childress enjoyed his filet so much that he asked the chef where he purchased his meat. That led to a friendship with Jim Offenbach, proprietor of the Golden Gate Meat Company.

Each summer, when the NASCAR circuit comes to race at Sears Point in northern California, the two always get together. In addition to sharing good food and fine wine, Offenbach likes to share an occasional tip on a hot, young driver in the Winston West series, in which he owns a piece of a team. In 1998 the name on Offenbach’s list was Kevin Harvick, a 22-year-old who drove for a rival team and was on his way to the points championship.

“I just thought Harvick really had it,” says Offenbach. “He could get a car to the front and bring it home. He was cocky, but that’s good. That’s what you need to be.”

Childress made a note of the name and was impressed when he watched Harvick race a few times in the Craftsman Truck Series in 1999. It wasn’t so much the youngster’s finishes that intrigued Childress, but his ability to make his way through traffic from the back of the pack. Childress hired Harvick that August to race on the Busch Series full time in 2000, a great show of faith for a young driver who in his first whirl around a national circuit had finished 12th in the Truck standings. Then again, the kid did have something of a winning track record: He had won seven go-kart national championships between the ages of nine and 14.

Armed with a superior team and superior equipment, Harvick promptly won the Busch series rookie of the year, winning three races and finishing third in the points chase. Harvick was so impressive in two stints testing Earnhardt’s Winston Cup car that The Intimidator told Childress that if he didn’t put the prodigy in a Cup car soon, Earnhardt might steal him away to drive for Dale Earnhardt Inc. The week before this year’s Daytona 500, Childress announced that Harvick would run seven Winston Cup races in 2001 before joining the circuit full-time in 2002 as one of Earnhardt’s teammates. In the meantime Harvick focused on a run for the 2001 Busch championship.

All those plans, of course, changed on Turn 4 of the final lap of the Daytona 500. While Earnhardt’s death sent the racing world into shock, Childress had to quickly make difficult decisions about his team. He opted to paint the black number 3 car white and change the number to 29 then hand the keys over to Harvick. That’s how Harvick found himself making one of the most publicized Winston Cup debuts ever one week later at Rockingham, using the car and the race team of a freshly lost legend. Harvick’s 14th-place finish impressed Hamlin more than any other race this year. "That first race was a tough day for all of us,” Hamlin says. “Then we kind of lost the handle on the car, but Kevin did a really good job of driving that thing the best he could all day and not putting it in bad situations. He got the best out of the car on a day that we weren’t even real interested in racing.”

Two weeks later Harvick made things plenty interesting by winning the Cracker Barrel Old Country store 500 in Atlanta in breath-taking fashion, grabbing the lead with a three-wide pass with five laps left and holding off Gordon by a mere .0006 of a second. Suddenly, Harvick wasn’t just the Kid Who Replaced Earnhardt but a driver to be reckoned with. Most important, the win made firm believers of Harvick’s race team. “He made moves at Atlanta that were uncanny for a rookie,” Childress says. “For that victory to come when it did really pulled our team together. If we had had to go out there and struggle just to qualify for races week after week, it would have been tough for us to stay together.” Harvick added a second win at Chicago in July, compiled 15 top 10s and only twice finished lowered than 25th.

Between his starts at Rockingham and Atlanta, Harvick did make time for one social engagement: He married DeLana Linville. “If I hadn’t gone through with that,” he says. “I would have been in big trouble.” The couple wed Feb. 28 in Las Vegas before that weekend’s NASCAR races, celebrating for three nights in the Hollywood Suite at the Rio in lieu of a honeymoon. Has anyone ever had such a month? “We lose Dale. I had to race in Rockingham, I got married the next week, and I won in Atlanta the next,” Harvick says. “I went from a Busch driver to a Winston Cup driver to a Winston Cup winner and from a bachelor to a married man. That’s about as much as you can change a person’s life in four weeks.”

One thing, though, didn’t change: Harvick’s determination to win the Busch title. That made for the most grueling schedule in modern NASCAR history, a dizzying series of plane rides, helicopter jumps, dozens of qualifying runs and 69 races in a period of nine months. During one stretch, from July 14 through Aug. 25, Harvick ran 12 races in eight states in six weeks. He even ran a truck race at Richmond in September, finishing second, in part to thumb his nose at those critics who said he was foolish to compete full time on NASCAR’s two highest levels simultaneously. Starting in late July, in the midst of a 6,220-mile stretch of cross-country travel, Harvick all but sealed the Busch title with three firsts, a second and a third in a five-race stretch.

Through it all Harvick has maintained the hard-charging style that had once caused an early sponsor of his go-kart team to stop paying for equipment because the 12-year-old Harvick seemed to rip off his side panels every weekend. In the June 24 Winston Cup race on the road-course layout at Sears Point, Harvick found himself on the fender of leader Robby Gordon, a lap down with 15 left. Riding on fresh tires, Harvick wanted to get his lap back, but Gordon wouldn’t budge – despite several nudges from Harvick. Preoccupied with Harvick, Gordon lost the lead and the victory to Tony Stewart. Harvick, meanwhile, eventually got his lap back and finished 14th. Looking back, Harvick feels no need to apologize. “We gained 51 points from that move,” he says. “I know Robby lost the race, but 51 points could mean a few spots for us at the end of the year. That’s how I’ll race every week, aggressive and hard.”

Harvick was fined $10,000 and placed on probation through the end of the year for a shoving match with Chad Little at Darlington after a Busch race on Sept. 1. The next week, in Richmond, Harvick raised the ire of Winston Cup veteran Ricky Rudd, bumping him out of the lead with 17 laps to go. Rudd returned the favor by nudging Harvick and passing him with six laps left for the victory. Rudd then gave the rookie a postrace lecture. “What I gave him was a clean love tap,” Rudd said. “What he gave me was a cheap shot trying to wreck me.” That raised echoes of how veteran drivers had responded to the aggressive ways of the young Earnhardt, who once inspired Darrell Waltrip to quip that “for the first time in racing they’ve found a way to put the hood behind the wheel.”

Still, Harvick has his supporters. “Kevin’s done a great job,” says Dale Jarrett. “If it wasn’t enough that he was put into a very difficult situation, he’s maintained his Busch ride and has done a fantastic job on the Winston Cup side. He’s tremendously talented and has a lot of confidence. He’s the kind of person we want in our sport.”

When Harvick opens the 2002 season in a 29 car newly painted in silver and black, he’ll no longer be an unknown quantity. That’s fine with him. After proving that he belongs on the short list of Winston Cup contenders with his sterling rookie performance, he knows he won’t be sneaking up on anyone – and doesn’t need to. “When you instill confidence in a driver and his race team, it’s like pushing a snowball down a hill – it just gets bigger,” Harvick says. “It’s still getting bigger.”

For more on Winston Cup's 2001 season, including a special tribute to Dale Earnhardt and the early bird's 2002 season preview, check out Sports Illustrated Presents Special NASCAR Commemorative Issue, on newsstands now. To order a copy of this special edition, call toll free at 1-800-835-5800.

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