He was on his own path, making his way toward a ride in NASCAR’s elite ranks.
Then everything changed.
Suddenly, Kevin Harvick found himself in the midst of tragedy and despair. He inherited a team trudging onward despite unbearable heartbreak, a legion of devastated fans, a legacy of championships and winning. Only 25, some expected him to be a replica of Dale Earnhardt, the man he replaced. The spotlight bright, the pressure intense, the young man found that few wanted to know who he was – they just wondered if he could be like Earnhardt.
For Harvick, it was a complicated, intense, confusing time.
Accustomed to being known and judged on his own merit, his own personality was completely lost on many of those looking for him to somehow work a miracle – to make the pain go away. Everyone, it seemed, wanted him to be Earnhardt.
At the start of 2001, Harvick was preparing to run a partial schedule in the Cup series. He’d tested some Cup cars for Earnhardt and his team and planned to compete as his teammate in 2001. When Earnhardt was killed on the final lap of the season-opening Daytona 500, everything changed. Harvick stepped into what was now the No. 29 to complete the season. He ended up winning the third race of the year and finishing in the top 10 in the standings.
But that certainly wasn’t the story of his season. That was the reaction to his move into that car – and constantly being measured by the standard that had been Earnhardt.
Years later, Harvick can see all of that. He recognizes why others wanted to put so much on him, how fans transferred their loyalty and expectations. After all, he was fiery in his own right. He wasn’t particularly fond of holding his tongue. But he wasn’t trying to be someone else, to replace anyone or even continue Earnhardt’s legacy.
He just wanted to be his own man.
And when he bristled against all those mounting comparisons, he wasn’t really fighting being recognized for any perceived similarity to Earnhardt. He wasn’t trying to escape his new role with Richard Childress Racing. He clearly carries a huge amount of respect for Earnhardt – as a man, a racer and the one who built RCR to an elite level.
And that was the crux of the issue. Harvick, in his own mind, didn’t deserve any of those comparisons to a seven-time champion. He hadn’t even won a Cup race yet – what right did he have to be mentioned alongside Earnhardt, he wondered?
“I never really felt that pressure,” he said. “Maybe I was just too naïve to feel it. When I show up at a race track, it’s always just about getting in a race car and going as fast as I can and trying to go faster every time you get on the racetrack. In the beginning, that’s probably where a lot of the defensiveness came from, just from the fact that people expected you to be this and I was just bound and determined to be who I was.
"Richard told me the first day he hired me, he said, 'I don’t want you to dress different, I don’t want you to act different, when you screw up learn by your mistakes.' From that first day forward, it’s always been, 'I don’t want to be somebody else for you. I want you to like me for who I am and I want you to not like me for who I am and that just goes from item to item to item.”
He says that things were “backwards,” since he didn’t have the on-track performance or known personality to be in that position.
“Everybody already expects you to be him and I haven’t done anything,” he said. “So none of it made sense to me for a long time and then we were finally able to accomplish some things and realize now it’s comparisons. In the beginning, it was just everybody wanting you to be something where I just really wasn’t.”
It’s a purely human reaction, something those around him certainly understood.
Not only was he taking over the position of a legend, but he was doing so in a national spotlight after such a traumatic and unexpected loss.
“It's hard to be in the shadow of somebody,” Harvick teammate Jeff Burton says. “There's no way that Kevin Harvick steps into that car after the tragedy without being in his shadow. You know, that's hard. I don't want to speak for Kevin, but it takes a little while to separate yourself from that. Kevin understands the history of our sport, he respects our sport more so today than he ever has.
“He really, by his actions, can tell you how much he's involved in the sport, how much he cares about it. I think he showed everybody that he respects the history of RCR, what went on well before he got there.”
Still, it took years for him to put it all into perspective.
A lot of them, actually, before he felt secure with his own place in the sport.
Now, though, he does.
“After we won the Daytona 500, I felt pretty secure about where we were as far as my career and things that we had done in the car and the races that we had won,” he said of his 2007 victory.
Now, he recognizes those comparisons for what they are – a compliment to both his talent and his path in NASCAR.
He admired Earnhardt growing up and carries a great deal of respect for what he accomplished, both in terms of championships and his role in crafting the Childress organization into the force that it is today.
So much so that he admits he got emotional during a recent preseason talk with the team, something that perhaps shows just how deeply touched he has been by the twists and turns in his career.
These days, Harvick is a perennial championship contender in his own right. He has 14 Cup wins, 60 overall victories in NASCAR’s three major touring series, and is a two-time NASCAR Camping World Truck Series championship team owner. He is judged on his own merit – and while the comparisons to Earnhardt continue, he now sees and understands the basis for those.
And that helps him embrace them completely – and continue to help his organization heal from the devastation of 10 years ago.
“It really does all come down to those comparisons are compliments of things that you’ve been able to accomplish on and off the racetrack as a driver and as an owner," he said. "Ironically enough, there are a lot of similarities as to the way that things have all laid out with owning the race teams and the car, but we’re fortunate to have had the success to back up our own name and do things our own way.”
