I will not back down to anyone.
— Kevin Harvick
I always like my chances at Daytona.
I had to decide if I wanted to race full time or be an architect. I decided I could always go back to school.
How many times have you had a crappy Super Bowl, but everybody goes to the Super Bowl because it's an event.
We've definitely been in a few positions where it's come down to the end of the race and we've been able to close the deal, and we've definitely been in position where we've lost a few.
I like football, baseball, basketball, golf, racing.
A lot of the kids we have coming up through our ranks now have been in stock cars since they were 12 or 13 years old. It's much different. I think you have to pick a path. If you want to race open-wheel cars and do those things, it's probably going to be carts and into an open-wheel series.
Winning takes you to that next level of being a bigger star.
I've been on the side of it where you have bad luck and slow cars.
I like the challenges we face in the future. That motivates me.
People like things that change. They don't like stagnant things.
I'm one of those guys that gets bored with things pretty fast, so I've got to keep it mixed up.
When you look at how the sports world is changing, you have to figure out how to become different than everyone else.
There's no bigger thrill than beating the guy you're not supposed to beat or winning a race you're not supposed to win.
I'm more comfortable inside the car than I am anywhere else.
I played baseball when I was in junior high, but that's the last time I played baseball.
When you have the most stable team in the garage from a financial standpoint and manufacturer standpoint, that attracts good people.
I sometimes need to be smarter, but that's not going to change how I drive.
I just try to be myself. But I will tell you this: I will not back down to anyone.
If you make the schedule exciting and make the events exciting, that is what guarantees you the people to come back if they had a good time.
I think when you have kids, it definitely makes you look at things from a different perspective, but I think that the biggest thing it's done is it's made me look at things from a different perspective from a professional standpoint in how you analyze things and how you look at things and how you react to things.
I have been around this long enough to know that there are no givens in this particular sport. There are too many things that can go wrong. There are too many things that can change.
We have to take the good with the bad.
I have never driven an IndyCar, but based on everything I've heard, the characteristics and how you drive them are 180 degrees different.
I think, as competitors, you always wanted to try and gain an advantage, and you have that opportunity to go out and grab those bonus points and gain as many as you can throughout the year.
I've been a part of this before, where you think the racing gods are against you, then next thing you know, you can't do anything wrong. You're winning races and doing things you feel like you shouldn't have done that particular day. It all comes full circle in this sport. It has a funny way of doing it.
Even if you only have 30- or 40,000 people in the grandstands, if you put on a good event for TV and do the things that it takes to have a unique event, that is really what people want. They want unique things.
In my opinion, the most stagnant thing in our sport is our schedule and our venues that we go to.
One thing I can't stand is when people - not our team, but other people - don't respond. Everybody can email, everybody can text... using an email auto-response is not the world we live in.
We don't ever want to lose a deal. So we treat a $5,000 sponsor like a $5 million sponsor, both because it's the right thing to do and because we've grown a lot of our sponsors from thousands to millions.
There were some struggles throughout the year at RCR. In order to keep yourself relevant, you had to find a headline. In order to find a headline, you had to do something that wasn't right, like jump over a car or say something you shouldn't.
For some reason, the busier I am at the track, the better I tend to race. I think it's because I don't have to deal with all the distractions outside the car that can get me in trouble at times.
My favorite part of any military feature, aside from the people themselves, is how clean and organized everything is. I like things clean and organized, and they don't get any cleaner or more organized than they are in any branch of the military.
Winning makes everything better.
Dale Jr. has never gotten a fair shake from the start because, guess what? He's not his father. He was always supposed to have been someone else. The pressure he's under is unreal.
I let people draw their own conclusions about my similarities to Dale Sr.
People don't like the same thing. You have to keep their attention.
I don't know why we have this flair for having dramatic finishes, but we've definitely had a few through the years.
I like competition. For me, it is fun.
I've been fortunate enough to have won a lot of races and do a lot of things in my career.
Chase Elliott winning is better for our sport.
When you have fast cars and bad luck, it's a lot easier to handle than having slow cars and bad luck.
That's your goal every week: to put yourself in contention. There's a lot of circumstances and a lot of things that have to play out for that to happen.
You can beat a dead horse as much as you want, but it doesn't come back to life. And sometimes you just have to change things up to keep the excitement and enthusiasm in the sport.
I think some of that comes with age, with life in general, to try to keep yourself as healthy as possible.
If you follow the same path as everyone else you're just going to be like everyone else.
Experience will always win in this sport. That experience helps with a lot of things, even in the race shop. You are going to have experience in certain scenarios where you can make those right decisions.
If you can qualify on the pole or in the front, you have a better chance of getting five points for leading a lap or leading the most laps.
Racing's my life.
It's always interesting to see how other people relate to their jobs.
