Harvick was once NASCAR’s punk kid. Now he’s molding its future

3:42 PM ET

Here’s a real-life truth that no one understands until they find their lives standing squarely in the middle of that very truth. Being the wisest person in the room isn’t about being the smartest person in that space. It’s about being the person who has been in that room the longest. The one with the most experience. The owner of the largest scrapbook of memories and moments, and the lessons learned from both. Smart enough to appreciate it all.

“I think that’s a natural life progression, right?” said Kevin Harvick, who at 47 and now in his 23rd and final season in the NASCAR Cup Series finds that he is now, more often than not, that person in most every room of racers he’s standing in. He is the procurer of quite the collection of experiences and the wisdom that comes with them. “You know, life progression is hopefully maturing as you go through time. To be able to do things in a better way and learn from what you did before. So, every moment matters.”

This weekend will mark not simply one of those moments, but a genuine milestone in a career packed with them. Sunday’s GEICO 500 at Talladega Superspeedway will be his 800th start at stock car racing’s highest level. In 75 years of NASCAR, only 10 drivers have hit that mark, and only four of them reached it at a younger age than Harvick. If he finishes out the season having started every race, he will retire with 826 Cup starts, eighth all-time. His 1,272 starts across all three NASCAR national series already ranks first. His 60 Cup Series wins rank 10th. His 62 second-place finishes rank sixth. His 258 top-five finishes rank … OK, you get the idea.

The complete list of Harvick’s all-time top-10 rankings would take up more space than this story has been given. Besides, you can read them all on his NASCAR Hall of Fame plaque when he is no doubt voted in on his first year of eligibility, now less than three years away.

Right now, he’s too busy trying to win a second Cup Series title to spend much time looking in the rearview mirror. More than a third of the way into the 26-race “regular season,” he sits third in the championship standings, only 15 points behind leader Christopher Bell. So yes, Harvick’s final career numbers have yet to be determined, but when every weekend presents another milestone or another rung climbed on all of those all-time lists, avoiding the topic of career summation is impossible — especially since the preseason announcement of his intention to retire at season’s end.

“I think honestly when we got to 60 [career wins] that that kind of put it in perspective,” Harvick confesses, speaking of his Richmond victory Aug. 14, 2022. “Really, for me, when you start hearing your competitors talking about it. I’ll never forget Cliff Daniels [crew chief at rival Hendrick Motorsports] walking up to me when I had my 750th consecutive start [this Feb. 26 at Auto Club Speedway], the things that he said that day really helped put it into perspective for me. Because when you gain the respect of your competitors on the racetrack, but also the people in the garage, that to me is really the rewarding part of the body of work.”

The earliest days of Harvick’s career — heck, the first decade of his career — weren’t filled with such praise from peers. Nor was he one to send cheer and good tidings in the direction of others in the paddock, whether they be the competition or even those with whom he worked. Just look at that consecutive starts streak. It currently sits at 757, third all-time, and should he finish out the season uninterrupted, it will end at 784, a scant 13 races short of Jeff Gordon‘s all-time iron man streak. The only reason he won’t own that record outright is because he missed the eighth race of 2002, his second season, parked by NASCAR at Martinsville Speedway for a tantrum thrown in a Truck Series race the day before.

That’s how Harvick rolled back then. Angry. He feuded with veterans such as Bobby Hamilton. He famously leaped off the roof of a Busch Series car onto the head of Greg Biffle during postrace interviews at Bristol Motor Speedway.

Thrust into a Cup ride earlier than planned, an into-the-deep-end experience that will never be replicated, pushed into NASCAR’s most famous ride because of the death of Dale Earnhardt in the 2001 Daytona 500, Harvick impossibly won in only his third Cup start in The Intimidator’s Chevy, edging Gordon by .006 seconds at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Oh, and he also got married in the middle of those three races.

From there, the 20-something Californian raced with guard up and his fists clenched. In 13 seasons driving for Richard Childress Racing, he won 24 times, including the Daytona 500 and Brickyard 400, but also endured three winless years and failed to win a championship. His increasingly heated in-race radio exchanges with Childress became must-hear entertainment for race fans seeking drama on a Sunday afternoon.

That’s how one earns the decidedly and deliberately ironic nickname “Happy.”

“We are both people who have no problem speaking our minds, even when we should keep those thoughts to ourselves, especially on the radio when everyone in the grandstands can hear us,” Childress recently said of those days, chuckling. “But that fire is also what you want in a race car driver. Sometimes that fire is going to burn some stuff down. And we did.”

“It was always just, you know, ‘He’s mad. He’s angry,’” Harvick recalled this week when looking back on his tumultuous tenure at RCR. “When I was driving the 29 car and you look back, I told Richard this, I said, ‘Man, I wish I could have done it this way. The way I do things now, with maturity, experience. You know, things might have been a little bit different.’ I would handle things a lot differently, how we did all of that. But, you know, everything just leads to the next step.”

The next step was the second half of that career and the next phase in his life as a man. He moved to Stewart-Haas Racing in 2014 to join friend and fellow anger-management student Tony Stewart and immediately won that long-elusive Cup Series championship. Harvick has added another 37 wins. He has gotten out of NASCAR team ownership, opting to expand his sports management business, and has shifted his focus toward being a father of two, with 10-year-old son Keelan now behind the wheel.

“It’s really been two different parts of my career,” Harvick replied when asked the impossible question of identifying the single most memorable moment among his first 799 Cup Series starts. “The announcement that you’re going to drive your first Cup race was bigger than any moment that you’ll ever have in your career. Then your first win was bigger than any win that you’re ever going to have. So, all of these things that you had to go through and face, the rest of it, that felt like a cakewalk to be honest, because you never had something that was that big again.”

This is year 10 at SHR, always behind the wheel of the same car and, against all known NASCAR natural laws, always with the same crew chief, Rodney Childers.

Racing towards his 800th Cup Series start. pic.twitter.com/jRLheajTfw

— Stewart-Haas Racing (@StewartHaasRcng) April 18, 2023

“It all shifted in 2014 because everybody said, ‘OK, now is he going to be able to succeed at a new team and can he get along with people?’ And here we are 10 years later, with the same crew chief, same organization and a championship. You look at that Homestead win that won that championship, and that was a huge moment. The biggest moment in the second part of my career. It’s of comparable importance, but not really a comparable experience, to that very first win.”

That ability to compare experiences, moments and even eras, that is the gift of wisdom. The well-earned byproduct of an unparalleled multidecade career. In our youth, we all fall into the same trap that ensnared Harvick so many years ago: believing that we know more than we actually do. Only via the hindsight of experience does anyone truly understand the value of genuine perspective.

Say, the latest Next Gen race car.

The tide of praise for NASCAR’s 2022 one-size-fits-all machines officially began to turn last summer, when Harvick began speaking up with concerns about safety. After his playoffs started with a 33rd-place finish due to a fire in his Ford, he said on live television, “What a disaster for no reason. We didn’t touch the wall. We didn’t touch a car and here we are in the pits with a burned-up car and we can’t finish the race during the playoffs because of crappy-ass parts.”

Just this week, he responded to a tweet reporting that NASCAR teams believed parts for 2024 needed to be ordered now to head off supply chain issues, posting “1000 HP spec. Order it …”

“Honestly, the communication between the teams and NASCAR is as good as it’s ever been. The problem is that the process of making changes is just as slow as it’s ever been,” Harvick said when asked about his call for more horsepower. He also suggested quicker tire wear before adding, again, the kind of nuanced take that can only be informed via experience.

He recalled 2007, when the sanctioning body rolled out the so-called Car of Tomorrow. Like today’s Next Gen machines, the CoT was largely a spec car. Those who were around back then have mentioned the CoT a lot in the past year. It’s just that there are fewer and fewer around now who were also around then. Harvick, then at the height of his Happy days, is one of them.

“It’s the same process. It’s no different. We already went through this. With the CoT and whenever NASCAR has started changing rules,” he said. “In the very beginning nobody knows anything about the car, and once everybody figures out the car, things change. The style of racing changes. It always does. It always will. So, yeah, I think communication is there, but I think the process is as slow as it’s ever been, unfortunately, to be able to make changes because of how much red tape there is to jump through because the teams aren’t in charge of the cars.”

Call him Happy, call him The Closer, call him old man, whatever you want, Harvick’s opinions are no less pointed than they’ve ever been. His intensity is the same now as it was 799 Cup starts ago. These days he simply yells less. He keeps his volume knob somewhere in the middle instead of breaking it off to be stuck at 11. But now the kid whom every veteran of the Cup Series garage used to either bash or avoid altogether has become the veteran whom today’s kids seek out for advice and a point of view that could only come from a racer who started his career in a world sponsored by cigarettes, racing against men who have already been enshrined in the NASCAR Hall of Fame.

You know, wisdom.

“I think at that particular time, starting out, you really don’t even know what that means, right?” Harvick said. “But I’ve been here for so long, through so many generations of cars with so many people, I think putting that body of work together, that is for me very rewarding. Through the years, the ups and downs, we’ve always figured out how to get things going again and be able to be competitive and run upfront.

“I was just a kid going to the racetrack having a good time, driving whatever I could race just to get on the racetrack. Now, 800 Cup starts later, all these years later … that’s something you can be proud of.”