Kevin Harvick has just ten races left in his storied career. Harvick’s 23rd and final season at NASCAR’s top level will conclude in 2023. Along the road, Harvick has won 60 Cup races, 47 Xfinity races, and 14 Truck races. He also won two NASCAR Xfinity championships and a Cup series title in 2014, the year he switched from Richard Childress Racing to Stewart-Haas Racing.
Most drivers might be fine with stepping away from the grind of the 36-race NASCAR Cup season and transitioning to television, as Harvick will do when he joins the Fox broadcast team in 2024. Others may simply ride off into the sunset, turning away from the spotlight and occasionally competing in other motorsports. Harvick could be referring to the CARS Tour, a southeast regional asphalt racing series featuring Pro Late Models and Late Model stock cars that he co-owns with former drivers Jeff Burton, Dale Earnhardt Jr., and Justin Marks, the founder and co-owner of Trackhouse Racing.
Harvick, however, will remain very busy after 2023 despite being free from the constraints of fulltime competition in the NASCAR Cup series.
Kevin Harvick started Kevin Harvick Incorporated (KHI), a race team of his own, in 2002 fielding entries in the NASCAR Xfinity and Truck series. He merged the team with Richard Childress Racing in 2012. And though he no longer fielded cars on track, he wasn’t done with the KHI branding. The company’s mission instead pivoted from racing on the track to managing athletes and entertainers.
“KHI Management really started accidentally as most good things do,” Harvick told Forbes in 2021. “For us, Donald Cerrone (MMA fighter) was on a “Tap Out” tour bus, and they were coming through the Texas Motor Speedway in probably 2000, I guess it would have been ’12 or so.
“We sat down, hit it off, started going to a couple of fights and he called one day, and he said, ‘Hey, I’ve been around you guys a lot.’ He’s like, ‘I like the way that you guys function. What would you guys think about representing me?’”
That initial meeting led to a company today that manages over a dozen people from MMA fighters to PGA golfers, motocross riders, entertainers and of course, race car drivers including Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Ryan Preece. Harrison Burton, Ty Dillon his own son Keelan, who has a budding racing career going, and most recently Josh Berry the driver who will replace Harvick at Stewart-Haas Racing next season.
And while most drivers will see their sponsorships end when they stop racing, thanks in large part to KHI Management and the lessons he’s learned over the years, many of the partnerships Harvick has will follow him.
“I don’t know that we will actually lose a sponsor,” Harvick told Forbes Friday at Daytona International Speedway prior to his last summer Cup race there. “As you go forward, that will be different obviously.
“I think the partnerships that we’ve managed and are part of, I don’t know that I still won’t have a relationship with every one of them. I think as you move forward that’s one of the more rewarding pieces that has come out of this whole puzzle are the relationships and then also being a part of the conversations and the management group and helping find them things that fit their new budgets and new ideas and who and where you place those sponsorship dollars has been interesting, so there’s obviously a lot of moving pieces but we will have good relationships with many of our current partners as we move forward.”
There is no retirement plan in NASCAR. Technically drivers are independent contractors who have deals with the teams they race for. Unlike other professional sports leagues, like the NFL which has a pension plan in place for its players, NASCAR has no union or a real retirement plan for its players, the drivers who race a minimum of 36 races per season. They do provide medical coverage, but only while that driver is on the track.
But when Harvick ends his career with a checkered flag at Phoenix Raceway in November, he won’t simply slow down, in fact he will be quite busy with a retirement ‘plan’ of his own. But until then he’s relishing his final ride in NASCAR. A final 10 races in a final year that wasn’t originally in Harvick’s plan. He simply wanted to end the season, retire, and be done with it. But he was convinced to do otherwise. And now he’s glad he did, enjoying the accolades he is seeing along the way.
“I may have thought it was silly when we started,” Harvick said. “And I think as you look back at it and I listened to those conversations with our group at SHR and the way that Tony (Stewart, SHR co-owner) did his and the way that he thought he should have done some things, those things are fun.
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