No. 4 SHR driver to wheel throwback Budweiser scheme at Darlington
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Kevin Harvick voiced his thoughts openly last weekend about the state of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series schedule, painting his vision of what a revamped season of events could look like in broad strokes. Wednesday at the NASCAR Hall of Fame, the defending Sprint Cup champion sounded his approval for a do-over schedule change a long time in the making.
Harvick helped to unveil a throwback paint scheme for his Stewart-Haas Racing No. 4 Chevrolet, a nostalgic Budweiser look that he’ll use to defend his Southern 500 win this September at Darlington Raceway. The retro graphics are part of an industry-wide push for a classic throwback weekend at NASCAR’s original superspeedway, with opportunities for teams, drivers and fans to participate.
The celebration of tradition dovetails nicely with NASCAR’s 2015 schedule, which restored the South Carolina track to its customary Labor Day spot on the racing calendar. Though Harvick’s proposed schedule alterations included new tracks, potential additions of more road courses and other revisions, moving Darlington isn’t on his list.
“Well, it should’ve never been moved in the beginning,” Harvick said. “Now that it’s back where it belongs as the Southern 500 date, you see so many of the race tracks that have come from one race, gone to two races and then gone back to one — and there’s several more of them that need to go from two races to one and find some fresh places to show off our sport and generate some excitement with new fans in new places across the country.”
Darlington Raceway president Chip Wile helped the track announce its decision to incorporate classic touches to its lone race on the Sprint Cup schedule last April, well before the move back to Labor Day was made final. With both well-received developments coming to fruition in 2015, Wile said the reverberations were felt beyond the boundaries of the Palmetto State.
“I think everybody in the sport agreed that moving the Southern 500 back to Labor Day was the right move, and in our community, it’s been such great news,” Wile said. “Everybody has embraced us as a race track again and are engaged in all the different things that we’re doing.”
While Harvick has opened up about the rhythms of the NASCAR schedule, he said he hasn’t closely followed the drumbeat around shortening races, a topic NASCAR Chairman and CEO Brian France broached late last month in a meeting with Associated Press Sports Editors. One race that will most certainly remain intact length-wise is at Darlington, where the premier series — then called “Grand National” — ran its first 500-mile event in 1950.
“I haven’t been down the shorten-races path too far,” Harvick said with a smile. “I’ve been on the schedule rant, so I think as you look at the races and the length of the races, obviously, it seems to have been successful for some of the other race tracks to shorten them up a little bit. Things sometimes happen a lot slower, I’ve learned, in the business world than the way that (wife) DeLana and I ran our business. When we had a problem, we would fix it overnight. So that’s not how it works in the big business world.”
Wednesday, though, was all about celebrating Stewart-Haas’ foray into the realm of a classic feel for NASCAR’s oldest 500-mile race. Team officials indicated that retro paint schemes for its remaining three Sprint Cup cars — driven by Kurt Busch, Danica Patrick and owner/driver Tony Stewart — were soon to be released.
Harvick was assisted in pulling the cover off his old-school Chevrolet by NASCAR Hall of Fame inductee Rex White — who drove his own bright No. 4 Chevy, nicknamed “Gold Thunder,” for much of his storied career. White, 85, came closest to winning the Southern 500 with a runner-up finish in 1960, the year of his lone premier-series championship.
“The Southern 500 had to be the No. 1 because it was the only superspeedway at that time, until Charlotte and Atlanta got built,” White said. “A lot of people say, ‘well, what was your favorite superspeedway?’ There was only one and that was Darlington.”
Harvick’s No. 4 included a handful of other nostalgic touches — including the first look at period-style, white-letter Goodyear tires that will be used in the Sept. 6 race and an original, winged “NASCAR International” logo on the car’s A-pillar. According to Wile, the emerging details are just a sampling of what’s coming ahead of Labor Day.
“What we’ve said to the teams is just to do something retro, do something that really celebrates something you’ve done, your team’s done that gives people that old-school feel,” Wile said. “This thing continues to build. NASCAR is getting involved, the teams are getting involved, some of the official partners are getting involved, so this is something that everyone seems to be rallying around and it’s just going to be incredible.”