BROOKLYN, Mich. — Kevin Harvick isn’t impressed with the attitudes of some of the young drivers who have arrived in NASCAR in the last few years.
In the wake of a meeting on Friday in which NASCAR president Mike Helton asked drivers to complain less and be more mindful of the economic woes affecting fans, Harvick said Saturday a lot of the grousing is coming from drivers who haven’t been around long.
“There are a lot of them that disrespect the sport week in and week out and they act like a bunch of 18-year-old punks, which most of them probably are, and they just need to grow up,” Harvick said. “If we all move in the same direction, things will get better, as they would in any business, whether it’s the media or the drivers or the owners. Everybody here has the same goal and that’s to have a successful sport.”
The usually outspoken Harvick, once considered a bad boy in the sport, said the short meeting with Helton in the garage area at Michigan International Speedway was a good one.
“NASCAR talks to a lot of the drivers a lot of the time,” Harvick said. “It’s just a matter of how willing you are to go up and spend the time to talk about it. As young drivers … you don’t want to go up in the (NASCAR) trailer. It’s kind of like talking to your dad.
“When you turn 15, 16, or 17 years old, you kind of rebel against the whole situation, and a lot of the young guys in the garage don’t really understand what’s going on. And they’re really fast in the race car, but don’t really have a clue of everything that’s going on around them.”
Many of the recent complaints from Cup drivers have been about the Car of Tomorrow, which is being used for its first full season after a 16-race trial in 2007. Helton asked the drivers to be more patient and let the development of the car take place as the season goes on.
“Right now, there are some of them that, sure their car doesn’t drive like it was a couple of years ago. But this car was not intended to drive like the ones a couple of years ago,” Harvick said. “We were supposed to put more of the driver capability back in (their) hands. And if you go back a year and a half or two years ago, a lot of the guys just wanted to keep putting downforce in the car, put downforce in the car so they could hold the thing wide open.
“Well, that’s never been what NASCAR racing is all about. If they want something they can hold wide open, they need to go race IndyCars and ride around in a pack like that.”
MONEY SPORT: The announcement earlier this week that private equity firm Boston Ventures bought majority ownership in the 60-year-old Petty Enterprises team has stirred up opinions in the NASCAR garage.
“This sport has become a multiteam ownership (situation), a really high-dollar game,” noted Jeff Burton, who drives for Richard Childress Racing, one of the first Cup teams to enlist an outside investor. “The Pettys have had their multicar team. They certainly haven’t had the funding that Hendrick (Motorsports) has had. It’s really hard to compete. You’ve got to have the funding to compete.
“The thing about the investor thing that I quite haven’t figured out is bringing money from the outside is great, but if you’re an investor you invest because you believe it’s going to be profitable,” Burton added. “At some point, that has got to work out. What you have to make sure that … having a partnership gives you the ability to bring in more funds.”
Longtime star Mark Martin, driving for Dale Earnhardt Inc., which absorbed Ginn Racing last year, said it’s a different world than when he first arrived in Cup.
“The old-school me wishes it was back to the way it was back in 1980, ‘81, when I first came here,” Martin said. “On the other hand, nothing stays the same and nothing is like it was in 1981. It’s progress. It’s good things and bad things.
“The positives are, there is so much more opportunity than there was back then. When you bring investors in, it helps Pettys. It helps (Jack) Roush move to the next level and compete on the level that they were competing on before. Otherwise, it’s very difficult and winds up forcing you out the way it did Larry McClure, Morgan-McClure, for example.”
Kyle Petty, a third-generation NASCAR star and part owner of the Petty team, said the family team really had no choice about recruiting a monied partner.
“The guys that we grew up racing against, the Wood Brothers, the Bud Moores, the Junior Johnsons, the Holman-Moody’s, they’re not here anymore,” Petty said. “To survive, we have to change our model as this sport changes.
“Our industry changes. If you’re going to stay in that industry, you’ve got to be flexible enough to change with it or get shut out. We were looking at a place where if we didn’t start to do something, we were going to get shut out.”
HEALTHY SPOKESMAN: Kyle Petty is the national spokesman for the “Stay on track for better prostate health” program being introduced at the Michigan track on Father’s Day weekend.
“Prostate cancer affected both my dad and my grandfather,” the longtime NASCAR driver said. “I am nearly four times as likely to be diagnosed with this disease and a yearly screening is particularly important.
“I wanted to steer this program to emphasize the need for men to get checked for prostate cancer and, if diagnosed, assemble their own ‘pit crew’ of professionals — including a medical oncologist along with a urologist — to get them back on the road.”
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