Apr
Following the chaos that occurred during the last laps of the Cup race in Austin on Sunday, Kevin Harvick said that NASCAR’s driving code is “obviously different from how it used to be.”
A series of Turn 1 multi-vehicle pileups during restarts, which led to car and tire damage and caused cautions for debris, forced three overtime restarts, which lasted almost a hour to go through the last 10 laps of the Cup race.
In the last 15 laps, there were a total of five restarts. At the end of the season, Harvick will stop competing in full-time NASCAR events. He was in the thick of the action in his Stewart-Haas Racing Ford Mustang and finished the race in position 13.
From the start of his stock car racing career in the middle of the 1990s, he claimed that a lot has changed.
“Well, the driver code is not what it used to be when I first started – when you would run into the back of somebody on a restart and lift their tires up off the ground, because the nose was only 8, 9, 10 inches off the ground,” said Harvick. “It was much different then because there was a race etiquette that Ken Schrader, Bobby Hamilton, Dale Earnhardt and Mark Martin made sure that you understood.
“Usually, it came in ways of not being able to get your lap back when the caution came out. They would race you back to the yellow [flag] if you weren’t doing things appropriately on the racetrack.”
As he just observed his son Keelan progress through the karting ranks, Harvick thinks that these roughhouse tactics are ingrained in the sport in the present day.
“Today, I really see it at the go-kart tracks,” said Harvick. “The things you currently see on the racetrack are exactly how all of them are taught to race.
“They’re taught to block, they’re taught to race in the rain, they’re taught to run into you and they’re taught to gouge on the restarts, and that’s just the way it is.
“It’s just a different upbringing as far as how you teach them to race, compared to how I was taught to race, and there are a lot more situations where everybody has the resources and cars to get to the racetrack than putting your car together on a week-to-week basis where if you didn’t finish, you didn’t get to go for a few weeks.
“It’s a much different era of racing than what it used to be.”
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Nascar, NASCAR Cup Series, Xfinity, Kevin Harvick, Stewart-Haas Racing, SHR, Ford
