Kevin Harvick received the same answer nearly every time he asked other athletes how they decided to retire: Harvick would just know it was time.
The driver thrust onto the global stage when he was named Dale Earnhardt’s replacement just days after Earnhardt’s fatal 2001 crash will make this 23rd season his last in NASCAR. The 2014 Cup champion heads into his final year tied for ninth on NASCAR’s career wins list with 60 race victories, has 13 consecutive playoff appearances and is one of the final active drivers from the sport’s halcyon days.
“It’s great to be able to go out on your own terms and plan it how you want it to go, but the biggest thing that sticks out to me is my kids,” Harvick told The Associated Press ahead of his Thursday announcement. “Being home with them and seeing the impact that you have with them when you are home, being able to be part of that daily process and be that father figure, it’s just time.”
Harvick will turn his attention to Kevin Harvick Inc., his growing management business, the enjoyable time he has spent in the television booth, some bucket list racing and, most important, his young racing family.
He and his wife, DeLana, were adamant they would not raise racers, but the slow early days of the COVID-19 pandemic gave father and son too much free time and 10-year-old Keelan is now karting on the international level. The young racer spent part of 2022 racing in Italy — sometimes traveling abroad without either parent — and Harvick figures he saw his son race only three times last year.
And then there’s Piper, their 5-year-old daughter who now wants Dad’s attention when she’s in her own go-kart.
“You know, Keelan, he needs that father figure in his life, especially as he goes down the racing route,” Harvick told the AP. “And then Piper probably asks to go to the go-kart track more than he does, and having to send her to the track by herself really frustrates me.
“You don’t want her not to have the opportunity to learn like he did. She makes twice as many strides in a day while I’m there than she would in a day when I’m not there. So there’s just a time when you have to ask yourself, ‘What’s the most important thing for me and my time and my family right now?'”
Harvick had already overcome the NASCAR odds of breaking into the Southern-based sport from Bakersfield, California, when Richard Childress Racing said he would be a Cup rookie alongside seven-time champion Earnhardt in 2002. But when Earnhardt was killed on the final lap of the season-opening Daytona 500 in 2001, Harvick’s career was upended.
He was in the rebranded No. 29 Chevrolet five days after Earnhardt’s death — less than a week before the then-25-year-old’s planned wedding to DeLana — and that hectic season in the spotlight was a blur. Harvick won in his third start while splitting time between his new Cup ride and the Busch Series championship he was chasing.
Harvick competed in 69 NASCAR national races that season with a pair of Cup victories and five wins en route to the Busch title. He was busy but grew jaded by all the attention, the endless Earnhardt comparisons and the pressure of replacing a superstar during a yearlong grieving period that had engulfed NASCAR.
Perhaps that is what made Ha