KEVIN HARVICK Martinsville Advance No. 4 Subway Ford Mustang for Stewart-Haas Racing
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Event Overview |
● Event: Blu-Emu Maximum Pain Relief 400 (Round 8 of 36) ● Time/Date: 7:30 p.m. EDT on Saturday, April 9 ● Location: Martinsville (Va.) Speedway ● Layout: .526-mile oval ● Laps/Miles: 400 laps/210.4 miles ● Stage Lengths: Stage 1: 80 laps / Stage 2: 100 laps / Final Stage: 220 laps ● TV/Radio: FS1 / MRN / SiriusXM NASCAR Radio
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Notes of Interest |
● DYK? In every race where Subway® restaurants has served as the primary sponsor of the No. 4 team of Stewart-Haas Racing (SHR), driver Kevin Harvick has finished among the top-10. 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. 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. It’s a pattern that has continued in 2022, as Harvick took his No. 4 Subway Ford Mustang to a seventh-place finish Feb. 27 at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California. Harvick is back in the green-and-yellow colors of Subway this weekend at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway for the Blu-Emu Maximum Pain Relief 400, and his front-running ways have earned Harvick 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. The Full-Throttle Ham is sold exclusively on The Vault, available only at Subway.com and the Subway app, where sandwiches created by some of today’s most notable sports stars 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.
● Baseball’s opening day is this week (April 7, to be specific) and Harvick is batting almost .500 when it comes to finishing among the top-10 at Martinsville. The driver of the No. 4 Subway Ford Mustang has made 41 career NASCAR Cup Series starts at the .526-mile oval and recorded 20 top-10s, tied with Kyle Busch for the second-highest tally among active Cup Series drivers. Only Denny Hamlin has more top-10s at Martinsville (22).
● Among those 20 top-10s earned by Harvick is a win in April 2011. He defeated Dale Earnhardt Jr., by .727 of a second to win the Goody’s Fast Relief 500. It was Harvick’s 20th NASCAR Cup Series start at the track and his 16th career Cup Series victory. Harvick now has 58 career Cup Series wins and is alone at 10th on the all-time win list.
● Harvick’s next best finish outside of that lone Martinsville win in April 2011 was a third-place drive in the series’ prior visit to the track in October 2010. It was the start of a three-race run of top-fives at Martinsville, as Harvick followed his win with a fourth-place effort in the series’ return to the facility in October.
● Harvick’s best Martinsville finish since joining SHR in 2014 is a pair of fifth-place results – Oct. 29, 2017 and March 20, 2018.
● Martinsville is the shortest track on the NASCAR Cup Series schedule, and its tight corners with only 12 degrees of banking means that beating and banging – be it door-to-door or bumper-to-bumper – is commonplace. But that also means accidents are prevalent, and being able to keep one’s car running from start to finish is easier said than done. In Harvick’s 41 career Cup Series starts at Martinsville, he has an impressive lap completion rate of 98.3 percent. That means that of the 20,540 laps available to him, he has failed to complete just 344 of those laps. Among active drivers, only Kurt Busch has completed more laps at Martinsville (20,882), but with two more starts than Harvick (43).
● Harvick has tasted success in every type of car he has raced at Martinsville. In addition to his NASCAR Cup Series win, he has a NASCAR Xfinity Series triumph and three NASCAR Camping World Truck Series victories.
● Harvick is undefeated in the Xfinity Series at Martinsville. He earned the equivalent of a walk-off homer on July 22, 2006 when in his only Xfinity Series start at the track, he led three times for a race-high 149 laps to take the win by .271 of a second over runner-up Clint Bowyer.
● Harvick’s three Truck Series wins at Martinsville came in 17 starts. He won on March 30, 2009 (defeated Ron Hornaday Jr.), March 27, 2010 (defeated Hornaday again) and March 31, 2012 (defeated Ty Dillon).
● The Truck Series is where Harvick made his first start of any kind at Martinsville – Sept. 26, 1998 when he finished 25th. Harvick earned his first top-10 at Martinsville on April 17, 1999 in a Ford F-150 for team owner Jim Herrick.
● DYK? Harvick tested a NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour car at Martinsville on Jan. 21, 2020. The Modified Tour is NASCAR’s oldest division and it is the only open-wheel series sanctioned by NASCAR. Compared to a NASCAR Cup Series car, a Tour car is 11 inches shorter in height and a little more than 23 inches wider. It also weighs nearly 800 pounds less. Harvick’s test came via Ryan Preece’s No. 6NY Tour car. Preece was the 2013 series champion and he earned the first of his 25 career Modified Tour victories at Martinsville on Sept. 20, 2008, leading 265 of the race’s 300 laps. Harvick and his company, KHI Management, represent Preece, who is SHR’s reserve driver in 2022.
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Kevin Harvick, Driver of the No. 4 Subway Ford Mustang |
You’re in your 22nd NASCAR Cup Series season. You’re 10th on the all-time Cup Series win list. You’re a Cup Series champion. But your most recent achievement, and perhaps biggest, is that you have your own sandwich at Subway – the Full-Throttle Ham. All joking aside, is that a little surreal when you think about it and what your original goals were when you first started racing go-karts in Bakersfield, California? “I don’t know that I’d ever thought that I’d have a lot of the things I have today, and my own signature sandwich at Subway is one of them. I walk around sometimes and have to laugh at all the things I’ve collected over the years – the cars, the suits. I walk into my shop and I look at all the helmets on the wall and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, how in the world can you even process that you were going to have that many helmets?’ And then you look upstairs and there are suits everywhere, and shoes, and you just used to hope that yours didn’t rip so that you can wear the same one week after week so you could buy tires instead of new shoes or a new suit.”
Martinsville is one of those tracks where you’ve made a lot of starts, dating all the way back to 1998 when you raced there in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series with Spears Manufacturing. The track is celebrating its 75th anniversary and you’ve been racing there for 24 of those years. Does the history of Martinsville resonate with you? “Martinsville has a deep history in our sport. It’s a place that’s just a part of NASCAR racing and I think you have to respect that. But I definitely would tell you it’s not a racetrack that I would say, ‘This is where I want to go.’ It’s just not been a place where I’ve had streaks of success.”
Martinsville can be a frustrating track. For instance, you’ve won there, you’ve finished in the top-10 in just about half your races there, but you’ve also left that place shaking your head. Describe what it is that makes Martinsville so maddening, but also so rewarding when you do have success. “Look, I’ve done this a long time, and there’s really not going to be a racetrack that I go to that I don’t leave thinking that I could’ve done better. Martinsville is the one I leave thinking that probably more often than some of the others, but it’s going to be the exact same as any other racetrack when I get to Monday – it’s just going to be in the past and I’m not going to think about it. It’s been a racetrack where you just never know what’s going to happen. It’s just one of those places that’s been like that. I have no idea how we’ve won there, but we have. It was one of our most successful racetracks in the Truck Series, and I was able to win an Xfinity race there back in ’06. We’ve won in all the divisions there. It’s just one of those places that’s frustrating. Even on a day when you do well, you just leave there with your wires crossed.”
When Martinsville isn’t your favorite place, what do you have to do to still compete at a high level? “We’ve put in a lot of time this year – the simulator, we’ve been to two tests so far. We knew coming into this year that we had some habits we were going to have to break, thought processes that you were going to have to break to really understand this car, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job of that with all the adversity we’ve gone through so far this year. Martinsville will just be more of that same process, and that’s going to be our aggressive process until we get to victory lane.”
This NextGen car seems to be a little more forgiving than the previous generation car when it comes to beating and banging. Those composite body panels don’t cut tires like the sheet metal of past cars used to. Does that give drivers a green light to lean on one another perhaps a bit more than they used to? “You still have to be careful. Front-to-rear is fine with the foam and everything in the back of the car, but as we experienced at Atlanta when we had that front impact, it tore the fender off, which would’ve been fine, but when it pushed that foam back, it allowed the nose to go down on the car and then it grinds everything off. So, you still have to take care of the racecar. You still have a little more leeway than what you used to, you just don’t want to hit the wheels really hard because those parts will break.”
What’s OK and what isn’t when it comes to car-to-car contact at a short track? “You can pretty much tell if it’s on purpose or not on purpose. You just have to be mentally prepared to know that there is going to be contact as you go through that race. You just have to try to stay as calm as possible. But, usually, if it’s the same guy that keeps having contact, then you know you have to do something different.”
This is your 22nd year in the sport, but you’re driving as hard as when it was just your second year in the sport. What keeps you going and competing at this level? “I like where I race. I like Stewart-Haas Racing. I like the atmosphere. I like the people here. That’s really the biggest reason that I like to do it, especially this year. You’re with a group of people where you’re constantly problem solving. You’re trying to fix it faster than everybody else and come to something that is better than everybody else so you can win races. I like the core group of guys that I started here with. That’s why they all came here, and I guess I would feel like I’m abandoning them if I didn’t go a couple more years. For me, I still enjoy that challenge. I enjoy where this series is, and learning about the new car is not a bad thing to do as you go forward into the future and do something different.” |
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