I'm going to quit when I feel like I'm not having fun anymore or I'm not competitive.
— Kevin Harvick
The fact of the matter is that I'm never going to be Dale Earnhardt Jr. or Chase Elliott. You're not going to have that connection, the hardcore roots with the fans.
I'm not the spring chicken anymore.
I want to thank everybody at Stewart-Haas Racing, everybody at Ford for just continuing to put the effort they put into these cars.
The officials in the garage do a great job.
Life is an evolution.
These regional series - we need to have them strong to feed drivers to the Truck series. Nothing against ARCA, but NASCAR needs to have their own series be their own streams.
You always want to win.
It kind of sucks when you lose a dog; you don't realize how attached to them you are until they are gone.
We have a great group of people and sponsors around us, and you don't want to send them out as outcasts because you have this newfound success and this new tool of things you can sell.
I'm a pretty intense person at the racetrack, but when I'm not thinking about my race car or in the garage doing my job, I'm pretty laid back, and I like to be organized and do normal things.
It's probably 10% luck and 45-45 on the driver and the car. If you have a bad car, you're done.
I mowed yards with my grandpa at $10 a pop for awhile. I painted numbers on curbs. I cleaned swimming pools. I usually did all of that over the summer, and then I'd continue to do the yard part during the year as I went to school.
I don't ever leave my garage stall during practice. I don't want to know what other people are doing. I don't look at the scoreboard.
You hear too many guys talk about retiring too soon.
There's a difference between a superstar and a megastar.
I definitely want to get more involved in making sure that West Coast racing is healthy and where it needs to be.
Sometimes you've got to keep your mouth shut.
In my opinion, Jimmie Johnson should be our most popular guy because he's won seven championships.
I feel like there's value in experience.
The day that Chase Elliott wins his first race is gonna be one of the best moments in NASCAR racing because of the fact of how impactful it will be for all of us in NASCAR racing.
I love racing cars, and we have to have great competitors to make the diverse fan base have people to root for, and some people like calm, shy Ryan Blaney that knows a lot about the sport, or Chase Elliott, who's been around racing and has those deep ties to NASCAR and the southern roots of our sport. Those guys are all important.
The big things are the things that you don't expect.
The night I won my first Late Model race was the night my mom moved everything out of the house... There was a lot of situations like that.
I'm just a normal person.
Just in a professional world, sometimes a phone call is definitely more meaningful than a text.
I'm a guy that likes to sit in the quiet and think about things, and sometimes it's way more relaxing to have dead silence.
We get paid a lot of money to do what we do, and there's a lot of people who are dependent upon that car running well and us getting everything out of it as a team. So I'm very, very loyal to my team and the company.
I'm fortunate to have a solid fan base.
I have had window braces smashed in the front of my car, several times. They fail all the time in the front.
You want to see how many races you can win, you want to see how many laps you can lead.
They could find something wrong with every car if they took it apart for a whole day at the R&D center.
If you can get your team to that point of being able to be in that playoff race mindset every week, that's something that most teams can't do.
One of my strengths over the years is to be open-minded.
For me, I believe that Dale Jr. has had a big part in kind of stunting the growth of NASCAR because he's got these legions of fans and this huge outreach of being able to reach different places that none of us have the possibility to reach, but he's won nine races in 10 years at Hendrick Motorsports and hasn't been able to reach outside of that.
We can control how we run, and that's about it.
It's really not about what you have. It's about how you're able to enjoy life in general.
I grew up in a little bit of a broken home.
Being a good race car driver is one thing, but to take all the time commitments and all the pushing and pulling and learning when to say no - because you need to rest or focus on the things you need to do to make the car go fast - those are the hardest things to learn and the most distracting things to learn.
I purposefully try to go through days without picking my phone up, and that's hard to do because we're so dependent on it.
When we're outside of the racetrack and in our team meetings, you need to communicate with your teammates and do what's best for the company in order to give the people that work there the best opportunity to succeed and maximize the potential of their job.
I've been very fortunate to be part of the sport and be successful.
