Harvick defines his role as a champion

Posted on November 19, 2014 by Nascar

The 2014 Cup champ discusses how he found balance in his life and racing

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He’s a husband, a father and a race winner. At one time, he was a team owner as well.

Now Kevin Harvick is a champion. Specifically, he is the 2014 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion.

He’s had little time to celebrate since capturing the title Sunday evening at Homestead-Miami Speedway with a victory in the season-ending Ford EcoBoost 400. Media obligations have seen him appear everywhere from Bakersfield (California) to Bristol (Tennessee) thanks to the long arm of television.

The Stewart-Haas Racing driver joins a list of 29 others that have captured NASCAR’s top prize. At 38, he is neither the youngest champion nor the oldest. For now, he is what matters most — its most recent.

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Champions are those that have won races (although Ryan Newman certainly put that statement to the test this year), those who are seen as leaders among their teams as well as the sport in general.

Harvick says he’s given the task and the opportunity some thought. He’s seen how others have handled the expectations and requirements. And he knows how he will approach his newfound status.

"I think there’s a definite responsibility that comes with the championship," he said Wednesday, "and doing the things that you need to do to help grown the sport.

"Obviously there will be a lot of people looking for your opinion, and you all know that I have opinions on how things should go and what is best. So I think for me, it’s very simple; you be honest, you do ‑‑ just like we would do on a personal level. We’ll try to do everything that we need to do to help grow the sport, grow our sponsors, and as always, always push everybody around us to try to do things that are unique and different from what they’ve done in the past to try to make things better."

Harvick’s success has spanned all three of NASCAR’s national series. Since being ushered into duty in 2001 following the death of Dale Earnhardt, Harvick has accumulated 28 wins and now a championship in Sprint Cup, 44 wins and two titles (2001, ’06) in what will become the NASCAR XFINITY Series next season and 17 victories in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series. As an owner, he won the Truck Series title in ’07 and ’09 with driver Ron Hornaday Jr.

He’s had brushes with fellow competitors that have been reported, and he’s done more than his share of good deeds that have been ignored.

A career that he says began "backwards" has now come full circle.

"It’s like you started with everything that happened to Dale, and you go through all those scenarios and you have crazy amounts of fans and attention and all the things that came with that situation," he said.

Finding the right balance, on the track as well as away from it, wasn’t easy. But the journey taught him plenty.

The 2014 season "has been huge," he said, "just in the fact that I’ve been so excited to go to work and be a part of building something and not having the race teams (ownership) … really getting our life where it had a great balance – whether it be personally, financially or professionally. Everything that you do affects everything else that you do."

It’s something that he’ll no doubt keep in mind as he looks ahead to 2015, when his introductions will include the phrase "defending NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion."

"I think as you look at the last couple of years in our sport and you look at the owners and the drivers and the communication between NASCAR and those groups, I think you have to see the results of everything that has come out of the meetings and things that have happened over the past few years," he said. "I think the sport is in a better spot than it was. We will all have that constant communication, and I definitely, as champion, want to do my part and do it as well as possible."

Better to be a leader than a follower, he said, and when the opportunity presents itself, "you want to try to seize those moments and do the best you can to take control and do it better than it has been done in the past.

"We’ll do the best that we can," he said, "in trying to achieve that."

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Posted on November 19, 2014 by Fraser Nye

No. 88 crew chief transitions to NBC role with Homestead-Miami breakdown

Retiring Hendrick Motorsports crew chief Steve Letarte gave fans a taste of what next season’s Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup will sound like on NBC Sports when he put on his analyst hat on "The Morning Drive" Monday on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. But first he talked about leaving the pit box for the last time.

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"The toughest part was probably getting the race started," Letarte said. "I had to give my last instructions to Dale. That was a little tough, and then the boss said his piece on the radio, which I really appreciated. And that made it tough because that’s a guy I look up to. Something you really weren’t expecting."

The boss, Rick Hendrick, gave a shout-out on the team radio to Letarte, who won 15 races for his organization.

"Buddy, thank you for all the years," Hendrick said. "You’re an inspiration to everybody at Hendrick Motorsports, and we wish you nothing but the best."

Hendrick’s words meant a lot to Letarte, who has learned to prepare for almost every situation as a crew chief. But this one was out of his control.

"The rest of the weekend, you can mentally kind of compartmentalize," Letarte said. "Understand it’s coming. Get prepared for it. But when someone like the boss gives you that sort of pat on the back, that’s hard to take. It was an emotional last weekend."

Following a 14th-place finish with the No. 88 crew uncharacteristically a little off, Letarte told Earnhardt he would see him soon and then headed to the airport with his family. Leaving the garage hadn’t set in for him yet.

"I think it won’t be until this week where the alarm doesn’t continue to go off at 6 a.m. or 5:30 to go to the shop," Letarte said. "That’s when it will probably set in. When the emails go from the mid-100s down to the single digits with questions, I’m sure that is when it will start to sink in that we’re not preparing for the 2015 Daytona 500."

On Tuesday at the 48/88 shop, Letarte cleaned out his desk and left a winner sticker on new crew chief Greg Ives’ computer. Along with the photo, he wrote: "Cleaned out my office today. Left this sticker for the new guy. I expect a lot of these next year Greg &@DaleJr #winners."

As he begins his new career, one of his first acts was taking his kids for ice cream, writing: "So even freezing temps don’t keep my minion and piglet from wanting ice cream. #DadNight #WhyNot."

In addition to recounting his final time atop the No. 88 pit box for Dale Earnhardt Jr., Letarte analyzed the pit strategies of crew chiefs Darian Grubb with Denny Hamlin, Rodney Childers with Kevin Harvick, Todd Gordon with Joey Logano and Luke Lambert with Ryan Newman.

"What we had was four guys that have worked 35 weeks to try to win a championship, battling it out on the race track, battling it out on pit road," Letarte said. "How more fitting could it be than at the end we had one on no tires (Hamlin), one on two tires (Newman), one on four tires (Harvick) and one have some trouble on pit road (Logano). That’s the sport. It’s a total team sport."

Letarte congratulated "a very good friend of mine" Childers, who pulled out back-to-back clutch performances at Phoenix International Raceway to get into the Championship 4 and Homestead-Miami Speedway to win the NASCAR Sprint Cup Championship.

"Talk about a Game 7 managing decision," Letarte said. "Those guys made it, and the pit crew executed it. And then Kevin Harvick went out and did it on the race track, and I think they crowned a very deserving champion and that’s what the sport needs."

After 10 years as a crew chief for two of the most popular men in the history of the sport — Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr. — Letarte said, "The drivers are what people come out to see, and when you have the opportunity to put it back in your driver’s hands, I think you do that when you put tires on and you’re aware that tires fall off."

Then, Letarte made the case for each of the four championship crew chiefs, noting he would have made the same calls if he were in their chairs.

"The funny thing is I think everyone made the right decision for where they were running," Letarte said. "If I was the 11, I probably couldn’t pit from the lead with a championship on the line. If I was the 31, who had been good all day but not great, a little behind the 4, a little behind the 11, take two tires. Give yourself the chance to be the first guy on tires. The 4 car has the fast car. He puts on four tires. Unfortunately, Joey had his problem. So really I think I would have made the same call all four of those crew chiefs made in their situation."

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