Kevin Harvick: No one from Hendrick called me
It sure seems like any discussion regarding the possibility of Kevin Harvick going to Hendrick Motorsports was much ado about nothing.
Stewart-Haas Racing officially announced Thursday that Harvick had signed a contract extension with the team. Harvick said Friday no one from HMS had contacted him about leaving SHR following the 2016 season.
He event went so far as to tell Kasey Kahne, the driver of the No. 5 car at HMS, that the team hadn’t reached out to him.
“But I think as you look back and it got so out of control that I actually went to Kasey Kahne and I said look man, here’s what’s going on,” Harvick said about speculation surrounding his future. “And I told him there’s not been one person that’s called me from your organization and I want you to have the trust in your team. I want you to believe in your team. I want you to keep working on the things that you’re working on, but here’s where it’s at. Here’s what I’m doing. Here’s what I see. Here’s how it’s going to go. And here we are up until last week still running around.”
Kahne confirmed the conversation took place.
Thoughts of a Harvick move from SHR to HMS spurred from a combination of sentimentality and a lack of options – despite numerous public statements to the contrary for the driver himself. The sentimentality comes in for some when thinking that Harvick would have such an aversion to switching to Ford with Stewart-Haas in 2017 that he would leave the team to stay with Chevrolet, the car make he’s driven his entire Cup career.
Hendrick has been the engine and chassis supplier for SHR since the team’s inception in 2009 and Harvick has had the best two years of his career with the team. And if Harvick wanted to stay with Chevy, well, he had to stay with Hendrick.
Harvick drove the first 13 years of his Cup career for Richard Childress Racing. A reunion with Childress is very unlikely on the surface, especially given that the team is looking for a spot for Ty Dillon for the future. If you consider Childress as the No. 3 team in the Chevy hierarchy behind HMS and SHR, well, the Chevy options for Harvick become even more unrealistic. And that leaves Hendrick as the only “realistic” option for a “credible” rumor.
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
