Kevin Harvick describes origins of coming to race with Richard Childress Racing

Kevin Harvick welcomed Richard Childress to Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour, where the duo traded stories and took a look back at their relationship that spans over 25 years.

The former Cup Series champion wheelman raced for Childress for over a decade during his career, and while the two haven’t always seen eye to eye, it’s evident there’s immense respect between them. Richard Childress Racing was where Harvick dreamed of racing as an up-and-coming driver, and he told the story of how it all came to fruition for him.

“I think for me personally, I look back at 1999 and I had just gone to Liberty Racing, which was Brad Doherty and Jim Herrick at the time to race their truck. And I went there at the end of 98 and sat down in Ohio, signed a letter of intent to race their truck in 99, raced their truck in 99 somewhere along the line,” Harvick reminisced. “I guess I signed a three-year contract at that table that night to commit myself to run in this truck. But at that time, the sport really blew up. And I think it was very similar to kind of some of the situation that we’ve been in over the last five years, where you had a lot of drivers that were kind of at the end of their career, and you team owners went to start looking for young drivers.

“So in ‘99, I get a call from you. I get a call from Joe Gibbs and Cal Wells. At that time, I was going through it with [Ron] Hornaday and my dad. My dad came to me and he’s like, ‘I really think you should just go cup racing for Cal Wells,’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know. I really want to go race for RCR,’ because I wanted to race with Dale [Earnhardt]. That was really where I wanted to be. So we really started pursuing trying to figure out everything to happen at RCR in ‘99.

“Well, I just signed this contract and I remember you telling me, you’re like, ‘You’re more than welcome to drive here, but you’ve got to get yourself out of your contract first.’ That was really one of the first lessons that I learned along the way, because I had to put a second on my house and I had to go get a loan to buy myself out of the contract after we negotiated. We lived off of DeLana’s credit cards for three months, because I had spent everything that I had to buy myself out of the contract.”

In the end, Kevin Harvick made the right choice, as his time at Richard Childress Racing helped kickstart a legendary NASCAR career that’ll end with him in the Hall of Fame. The duo will always be linked because of it, and time has seemingly healed any bad feelings the duo had for one another.