Harding looks to follow in dad’s footsteps

Shane Harding can’t really come up with the words to describe it.

Harding, the Super Stocks points leader at Evergreen Speedway, won his race last Saturday then immediately jumped into his dad Pete’s backup car to compete in the Northwest Series event. Shane crashed out early in the race, but he looked on as Pete roared to his first series victory since 2003.

“It was so exciting,” Shane said. “I wish I could have been running second, but just to watch it was awesome. To see him win on the same night that I won, with my grandparents, my sisters and their boyfriends, a bunch of my friends and a bunch of his friends all there, it was a great night.”

It was just the third time that the Hardings, of Langley, B.C., had run in the same race. Next year, though, the father and son could find themselves on the same track a lot more often. Shane, 25, hopes to join Pete, 54, on the Northwest Series Tour. But while they’ve talked about Shane taking over Pete’s car for some time, Shane says he knows that if he wants to race on the Northwest circuit, he’s going to have to find his own car.

“He used to say he’s going to race until he reached the number on his car, 39,” Shane said. “That was 15 years ago. He’s never going to be done. He talks about retiring all the time and then he wins a big one and forgets about it. He’ll be racing until he can’t see anymore.”

“Every time I get a win, I think I can keep going,” Pete Harding said. “But I’m pretty close. I don’t want to keep going to the track and run 10th or 15th. But as long as I can win a few, I’ll probably keep going out there.”

Pete Harding has been racing for 35 years. He won several Canadian championships, then won the Skagit Speedway championship in 1984, ‘85 and ‘86. Harding joined the Northwest Series in 1987 and has 17 wins since then. Pete won the series championship in 1999 and in doing so, became the second Canadian to ever win a NASCAR championship. But before Saturday, it had been 27 races since he had a victory.

“It wears on you and you start wondering if you’ll ever win again,” Pete said. “I finished second so many times last year, I felt maybe at my age I couldn’t get it done anymore. But after Saturday, I don’t have that feeling anymore.”

Shane knows that feeling. Last year, he says, he finished second so often he wondered if he’d ever win. But he finished the season with four victories in the last six races to finish second to John Zaretzke in the points standings. This year, he has six wins in 12 races, including five in a row, and leads Jason Fraser by eight points.

“The way we finished last year gave us a lot of confidence going into this year,” Shane said.

Shane said he uses his dad as a resource, bouncing questions off of him knowing that he’ll get the truth. Still, he says he felt plenty of pressure to live up to his dad’s accomplishments.

“I’ve been a part of his winning crews for a long time,” said Shane, who was Pete’s crew chief during the 1999 championship season. “I didn’t want to be the guy who didn’t live up to that. So there’s been a lot of pressure.”

“He’s had to fight some comparisons,” said Pete, who is now third in the Northwest Series points standings. “It was tough on him early on, but I think it’s gotten easier since he’s started winning.”

After their performances last Saturday, both men have high hopes for the rest of the season, and Shane hopes that a Super Stocks championship could lead to a ride next year on the Northwest Series tour, where he would go head-to-head with his dad every week. But for now, father and son are happy to remember last week, when both stood on the winner’s podium.

“I hadn’t won for awhile so it was such a great feeling to win it,” Pete said. “It was a really special night for us. I get so much pleasure watching him win and to be running so well. I don’t know that we’ll ever have a night like that again.”

“He’s won a lot of races and I’ve had a good year,” Shane added. “But for both of us to do it on the same night at the same track, it’s something that not many people get to experience. It was a great feeling.”