DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – The aftermath of Dale Earnhardt’s death in the 2001 Daytona 500 is well known and, in a lot of ways, still reverberating through NASCAR.
Twenty years have now passed since what many consider NASCAR’s darkest day and what’s often missed is the effect it’s had on Kevin Harvick.
Then 25, Harvick was summoned to fill Earnhardt’s seat. He is now entering his 21st season in the NASCAR Cup Series, now known as the 45-year-old who has placed Stewart-Haas Racing as Ford’s premier race team.
Harvick has gone through a significant rebrand since he left the shadow of Earnhardt at Richard Childress Racing in 2013. Up to his late 30s, Harvick was someone who knocked on the championship door, but never quite busted through.
Then, when he signed with Stewart-Haas in 2014, everything came together and Harvick won his first Cup Series championship at 38 years old.
He’s only gotten better since.
Twenty-seven of his 58 career Cup wins have come in his 40s. He has 21 Cup wins since 2018 and is one of two drivers to win 20 or more races in a three-year span since 2000. The other is Jimmie Johnson, who won 24 times between 2007-09.
But Johnson, who’s also 45, has retired from full-time NASCAR competition and turned his attention to a part-time NTT IndyCar Series program. Harvick, meanwhile, has just tapped into his golden years.
“It took a long time,” Harvick said when he felt he escaped Earnhardt’s shadow during Daytona 500 media availability Friday.
“I mean we’re 20 years later and it’s forever going to be compared just because of [how] everything went, but when I changed teams and went to Stewart-Haas Racing I felt like 2014 was really the year that you were able to legitimize everything,” Harvick added. “Just because you were capable of driving the car and being around people and doing the things that it took to win races and win a championship.”
It is actually remarkable what Harvick and the No. 3-turned-No. 29 crew accomplished in 2001. Harvick was supposed to move to the Cup Series in 2002 in a third RCR entry, but things ultimately never worked that way. Earnhardt’s famed black No. 3 transformed into a white No. 29 and Harvick was left having to shoulder Earnhardt’s Goodwrench image while trying to find his way as a Cup rookie.
Three weeks after Earnhardt’s death, Harvick out-dueled Jeff Gordon to win at Atlanta Motor Speedway by .006 seconds in a race for the ages. He finished the year with two wins and 16 top 10s, good enough for ninth in the Cup Series standings.
In 2003, more black worked itself back on the car, but the silver flames still gave Harvick his own look. At least, that’s what it looked like on the outside.
“For the first four or five years it was difficult just because of the fact that everything that you did was always compared to everything that Dale did,” Harvick said. “It was always, ‘it wouldn’t have been handled this way or it would have been handled this way. And this guy did that and that guy did this.’ It was just never something that was comfortable because as I said earlier I became defensive about, ‘well, I’m just not doing it that way in anything.’”
The Shell/Pennzoil era at RCR came along in 2007, as Goodwrench departed at the end of 2006. Coincidentally enough, Harvick won his first race that year, the Daytona 500, in the new-look No. 29 that traded its traditional black and silver for yellow and red.
Budweiser then came on in 2011, and Harvick enjoyed his best years at RCR in those colors. He finished third three times in the Cup Series standings and eighth once over those final four years at RCR. But, as Harvick brought to light, it was virtually impossible to fully detach his name from Earnhardt’s. After all, a miniature No. 3 decal always rode with Harvick in his 13 years at RCR.
“I didn’t want to do anything that was the same way [as Earnhardt] just because I got tired of hearing it,” Harvick said. “So as you got through the Goodwrench days and they kind of gravitated off the car … that, for me, made things more comfortable because you were living on your success and it wasn’t something that was given to you or a position that you didn’t deserve.
“It was a position that you had earned, which was always the way I felt like I wanted to go about things: You needed to earn it in order to be where you were,” Harvick added.
From his towering image to the safety innovations that followed, all the way to his souvenir ventures and his iconic style of racing, Harvick will always have deep admiration for Earnhardt.
Now Harvick is able to freely embrace his own image.
“He could move the needle when things needed to be moved from a competitor’s standpoint like really no other driver has been able to do, ever,” Harvick said. “He’s changed the game on a number of different levels throughout the sport. Just having that demeanor and the way he went about giving it everything he had, to do whatever he had to do to try to win a race or gain a position, was something the fans always latched on to.”