Event: Sport Clips Haircuts Help A Hero VFW 200
Date: Sept. 1, 2018
Location: Darlington (S.C.) Raceway
Layout: 1.366-mile oval
Kevin Harvick Notes of Interest
- Hunt Brothers Pizza makes its fourth start of 2018 as a primary sponsor with driver Kevin Harvick in the No. 98 Ford for Stewart-Haas Racing with Biagi-DenBeste (SHR) during Saturday’s NASCAR XFINITY Series race Darlington (S.C.) Raceway.
- Hunt Brothers Pizza will pay tribute to the 20th anniversary of Harvick’s 1998 NASCAR West Series Championship with a throwback paint scheme on the No. 98 Ford Mustang. The 2018 scheme was inspired by the No. 75 Spears Manufacturing car that Harvick raced to five wins, 11 top-five finishes, 12 top-10s and five poles in 1998 en route to his first NASCAR championship.
- Hunt Brothers Pizza and Haas CNC Racing first teamed up for the 2008 season. In 2014, Hunt Brothers Pizza reunited with what had become SHR to serve as a sponsor in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series. When SHR formed an XFINITY Series team for the 2017 season, Hunt Brothers Pizza became a primary sponsor with Harvick and the No. 41 team – which is now the No. 98.
- Harvick is making his final of five scheduled XFINITY Series starts in the No. 98 Ford Mustang for SHR in 2018.
- He won at Atlanta Motor Speedway in his first start of the season in the No. 98, finished 19th at Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, eighth at Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn and second at Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet.
- Harvick has one pole, three top-five finishes, nine top-10s and 189 laps led in 15 XFINITY Series starts at Darlington.
- Harvick won the pole at Darlington in August 2003 with a lap at 167.516 mph.
- His XFINITY Series career includes 47 wins, 185 top-five finishes, 259 top-10s, 25 poles and 9,688 laps led in 345 starts.
- Harvick will be joined Saturday by SHR teammate Cole Custer in the No. 00 Ford Mustang.
Kevin Harvick, Driver No. 98 Hunt Brothers Pizza Ford Mustang
The Hunt Brothers Pizza paint scheme gives a nod to your beginnings in NASCAR, inspired by your 1998 NASCAR West Series championship. What does running the Hunt Brothers Pizza throwback scheme like that mean to you?
“The throwback scheme Hunt Brothers Pizza is doing for us is pretty awesome – the 1998 throwback to the Spears championship car. That was probably one of the most fun years I’ve ever had in racing. We traveled up and down the road in a 1977 Winnebago and a 24-foot trailer because that’s what Wayne (Spears) told us that we had to use when we didn’t have the truck and trailer that were at the Truck races, so we had more fun in that motorhome than we probably did any other time that I’ve ever raced stock cars. We had one car. We had a group of guys who just loved to race and we raced all but one race, I believe, that year with the Truck series and wound up winning the West Series championship that we weren’t even supposed to run. So it was a fun year, and to have Hunt Brother’s kind of throw it back to that year for me is a lot of fun and definitely had some input on that one.”
What makes Darlington Raceway so unique in terms of the racing?
“Darlington is a track with a lot of history and is one that you circle on your calendar each year. This track has a lot of character and it is easy to make mistakes, so we just focus on ourselves, race the track and try to avoid making any of those mistakes.”
What is it about Darlington that makes it special for you as a competitor?
“For me, personally, I look forward to coming to Darlington every year just for the fact that it means so much to our sport and has such a huge history in what we have accomplished as a sport altogether. To be able to come back and race and be able to experience things they have experienced through the years on a racetrack that has been repaved, but its original shape is still the same – to me, it’s something that is pretty neat. I’m looking forward to the weekend.”
