“We’re Going to Show Him Tonight”: Kevin Harvick Recalls How Karma Hit Him for Disobeying His Father

Kevin Harvick is pretty much an elder statesman on the NASCAR Cup grid. However, he too has gone through a “young and stupid” phase. This was when he was around 17–18 years old and was employed in a workshop. Around that time, he disobeyed his father, but karmic justice soon came back to bite him. Recently, he joined Corey LaJoie and crew on the Stacking Pennies podcast and shared the story.

Speaking to the hosts, Harvick said, “I guess it would have been probably ’94, ’95, somewhere in there. […] It started with simple things like that, then you had to go work during the summer. So I cleaned pools, painted fences. That migrated into having our own stuff on the race team. I started working at the shop after school and during the summer.”

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According to the 2014 Cup Series champion, his father used to leave a list of chores on the side of the late-model car. At the time, Harvick and a friend would often work at the shop daily, but at different hours than his father. The driver confessed that the first thing they did after clocking in was to go for lunch. Then they would begin working for the rest of the day until night time or until morning. Unfortunately, this kind of schedule was not one that his father approved of, but Harvick cared little.

How did Kevin Harvick disobey his father?

One fine day, Harvick Sr returned from the fire station and checked in on the shop. However, he was not completely satisfied with the way Kevin and his friend had built the car. So, he removed the right front suspension, as well as various other parts from the car. His final declaration was that Harvick was not going to race—not on his watch. Though Harvick was pretty much ready to accept his fate, his friend had other ideas.

Harvick continued, “My buddy looked at me and said, ‘We got three more cars in here. Why don’t we just take the suspension off the over here.’ I’m like, you know what? F*** that, we’re going to race the car. I think I was 17 or 18, and we’re going to race the car. We take the suspension off, put everything on the car, we load it in the trailer. We push it in the truck, we get to the race track, like, ‘Yep! We’re going to show him tonight. He probably won’t even know we raced.’

“So, we go out there, qualify, trophy dash. Put it in the trophy dash, lap 1 of the trophy dash, right front hub breaks. Into the fence.

“At that point, we are loading the car up and we are taking the car back to the shop because we’re going to ‘fix it.’ So we fix it up the best that we could. (But) he knew. He knew before we even got out of the shop, probably. […] It was bad for a few weeks.”

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The Stewart-Haas Racing driver is one of the more mature personas in NASCAR. But it is good to see that he too went through a young-and-stupid phase.