Where is ... Harry Gant?

Yout get tired just listening to everything that Harry Gant has going on these days.

He works 50-60 hours a week tending to maybe 200 head of cattle on his 400-acre farm. He's replacing fencing. He's remodeling three rental houses he owns, building garages and porches. And, as if all that wasn't enough, he does a few appearances here and there for Manheim Auto Auctions, which sponsored his last Busch Series entry.

Courtesy/harrygant.com

Harry Gant

"I'm working on the farm," Gant said. "I'm replacing a lot of fencing I built about 15 years ago. I spend nearly all my time over there, and I have some property that I own that joins the farm, and it's got three rental houses on it. I've got a building that goes with one of those houses that used to be a body shop, so I rebuilt all of it and concreted different places, put new doors in ... the whole big deal."

The only thing he's not doing is attending a lot of races. At first, just after he retired as a driver at the end of the 1994 season, it was intentional. He had to get racing out of his system, once and for all.

Although Gant did run 11 Craftsman Truck Series races in 1996, he has largely stayed away. It took him about two years to get completely "race free" as he calls it. When he made appearances for U.S. Tobacco, parent company of his longtime Cup sponsor Skoal, Gant would ride his beloved Harley Davidson to the track if at all possible, do his two-hour grip-and-grin session and be done with it.

He rarely, if ever, made his way into the garage.

"I done it on the start [of his retirement] just to keep away," Gant admitted. "I did a lot of appearances for U.S. Tobacco. I worked for them up until this year, and they would send me to [an appearance] outside the racetrack in a big tent, a museum thing, they had. I did about 10 or 15 races a year, and then the last few years, it dropped down to just doing 10.

"A lot of car owners were calling me right from the start, when somebody would get hurt or somebody was changing rides. When they needed somebody right quick, they'd call. I just turned 'em all down. It was gonna get worse, and I was gonna end up stepping back in a car. I knew that right off. So I kept away from the garage and the racetracks. I don't go to any."

He attended a pre-race event at Lowe's Motor Speedway late last season, but left before the green flag.

"They had invited everybody who'd won that October race ... even Charlie Glotzbach from way back," Gant said. "They introduced us and took us around the racetrack in a flatbed truck. I left when the race started, came back home and watched it on television. That's about the nearest I've been [to actually attending] a race. (Continued)