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Notes of Interest |
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● Subway® restaurants is back with Kevin Harvick and the No. 4 team of Stewart-Haas Racing (SHR). Subway put its Eat Fresh Refresh™ on the fast track by becoming a primary sponsor of the championship-winning NASCAR Cup Series team last year and Harvick delivered. He finished among the top-10 in each of the three races where Subway was the primary sponsor of the No. 4 Ford Mustang. Harvick finished second in his Subway debut Sept. 18 at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway, ninth in the very next race Sept. 26 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and third Oct. 24 at Kansas Speedway in Kansas City. In 2022, Harvick earned his own Subway signature sub – the Full-Throttle Ham – which features thin-sliced Black Forest ham, crispy hickory-smoked bacon, pepper-jack cheese, and lettuce and tomato on fresh-baked artisan Italian bread, all finished with yellow mustard. It is available exclusively on Subway.com and the Subway app, and can be delivered straight to your door via Subway Delivery, powered by DoorDash. Subway has a $0 delivery fee on all Subway Delivery orders and guests can still earn and redeem Subway MyWay® Rewards points.
● Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California, serves as a homecoming for Harvick. The driver of the No. 4 Subway Ford Mustang is from Bakersfield, California, roughly three hours northwest of Fontana. He joins three other Californians competing at Auto Club Speedway – SHR teammate Cole Custer from Ladera Ranch, Kyle Larson from Elk Grove, and Tyler Reddick from Corning. In the 25-year history of the track, only four Californians have won a NASCAR Cup Series race at Fontana – Vallejo’s Jeff Gordon, El Cajon’s Jimmie Johnson, Larson and Harvick – but they’ve won 11 of the 31 races held.
● Harvick’s lone NASCAR Cup Series victory at Fontana came on March 27, 2011 when he beat Johnson by .144 of a second. Harvick led only one lap, but it was the only one that mattered. He took the lead from Johnson on the final lap to score his 15th career Cup Series win. Harvick has won 43 races since. His 58 career Cup Series victories puts him 10th on the all-time series win list.
● Harvick and Kurt Busch lead the NASCAR Cup Series in starts at Auto Club Speedway with 27 starts apiece – a streak that spans four decades (1997-2022). Next best in this category is Kurt’s younger brother, Kyle Busch, who has 22 career starts at Fontana.
● Harvick’s NASCAR Cup Series stat line at Fontana includes a win, seven top-five finishes, 10 top-10 finishes and 237 laps led. His average finish across his 27 career starts is 15.1, thanks in large part to completing 98.7 percent of the laps available (6,074 of 6,156 laps).
● Harvick has been competing at Auto Club Speedway ever since it opened in 1997. His first start at the 2-mile oval came on Oct. 18, 2017 in The No Fear Challenge NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race driving the No. 75 entry for Wayne and Connie Spears of Agua Dulce, California. Harvick started 28th and finished 20th, completing 99 of 100 laps. Harvick has made a total of four Truck Series starts at Fontana, with his best result coming in his most recent Truck Series start at the track – eighth on Feb. 23, 2007.
● Harvick also competed at Auto Club Speedway with Wayne and Connie Spears in the NASCAR K&N Pro Series West. He made two K&N starts for the family-owned team at Fontana in 1998. In his first start on May 2, Harvick started second and finished second, leading 32 laps in between. Ken Schrader took the win by 1.314 seconds. In Harvick’s K&N return to Fontana on July 18, he one-upped his performance from two months prior. Harvick started from the pole and ended with the win, taking the checkered flag by 1.15 seconds over Austin Cameron. He led 52 of the race’s 100 laps. Those victories were part of a five-win campaign that led Harvick to the 1998 K&N Pro Series West championship.
● The NASCAR Xfinity Series represents another successful element of Harvick’s career at Auto Club Speedway. In 20 starts at the track, Harvick has finished among the top-10 17 times. He has 12 top-fives, highlighted by a win in his second-to-last Xfinity Series start at Fontana. Harvick took the checkered flag on March 21, 2015 with an impressive 3.317-second margin of victory over second-place Brendan Gaughan.
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Kevin Harvick, Driver of the No. 4 Subway Ford Mustang |
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You’ve raced at Fontana 27 times in a Cup car, but is it a whole new ballgame going there with this NextGen car? “For sure, because you just don’t know. It’s always tire management, it’s always moving around the racetrack – being able to run the top and the bottom – but this car is so different in the way that it uses the tires, and the way it uses the right-rear tire, especially. I think as you look at that, it could turn into a tire conservation type of situation to where just have to pick a speed and run the speed so you can make it through a whole fuel run. You just don’t know those things until you go do it, so being able to adapt and adjust is going to be important.”
Has simulation helped you gain an understanding as to how the NextGen car will perform at a place like Fontana? “We’ll have our places where the simulator helps a lot, but there are some places where it won’t help a lot. When you go to Fontana, a two-mile racetrack where you have the most aggressive tire falloff of all the racetracks we go to, it’ll be trial by fire. It’s just not like anything else, and not knowing about the car, that’s where I go back to practice and make sure that you’re involved in everything that’s going on, because making sure that you take care of the tires, and making sure you can make them last, is going to be extremely important.”
You just spent a week at Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway and now you embark on a three-race stretch of events on the West Coast, starting with Fontana. How have you been able to simultaneously prepare for Daytona and this West Coast swing? “I think for Fontana, because it’s the first one, you’ll be prepared from the shop. When you go from the first race to the second race to the third race, you’re probably going to spend some time in one of those two racetracks’ garages working on the vehicle, preparing it for the next week. So our trailers and things are prepared well, but it’s not like working in your shop. There’s going to be a lot of racetrack garage and parking lot work that will go on.”
Is it preservation over performance for this three-race stretch? “Between the Daytona 500 and the West Coast swing, you can put a huge damper on the first half of your year if you’re not careful, just because of the fact that the progression with the car has to be there. If everything’s torn up, the progression of the car slows down because our sport is all about details, and you can’t detail the car to the point that it needs to be detailed in order to make it run as fast as it needs to run. Not having torn-up racecars is as important as anything in coming home from the West Coast swing.”
Despite not scoring a win in 2021, you were still extremely proud of everything you and the team accomplished because, week-in and week-out, you grinded it out just to get the best finish possible, and when the season ended, you were fifth in points, just like you were in 2000 when you won nine races. Can you expound on that? “With our current points system, the emphasis is on winning, but there’s way more that goes into our sport than just winning. And the way that we raced last year was the way that you won the championship, pre-playoff format. I think that our experience being able to be around those situations allowed us to put ourselves into the exact same position to have the exact same result that we had with nine wins just because of the fact that we knew how to race and get the most out of every week. And we understood that we were at a deficit from a vehicle standpoint, but we knew how to race better than anybody else and that’s just what it boils down to. A lot of guys had the fastest cars, and the fastest car wound up winning the championship. And for us, it was just a different style of racing that we had to revert back to in order to get the best results out of the season. But that goes with the experience of the team and the organization to know that we’re here, and how do we get there, and just dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s and doing the things that we needed to do to keep ourselves in position in order to get good finishes out of our races.”
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