Kevin Harvick did not hold back in criticizing the Next Gen car on Sunday after his vehicle went up in flames at Darlington.
The Stewart-Haas Racing driver spent most of the NASCAR Cup Series race at Darlington Raceway making up time from a poor first pit stop, and by Stage 3, he clawed his way into the top 10.
That is until fire erupted from the underside of his No. 4 Ford. Two laps before he managed to park his car, Harvick revealed that flames started coming through his dash, progressively getting worse. He climbed out of the vehicle and it became engulfed in smoke and fire soon after he left the window.
Prior to this, he had not experienced any engine difficulties nor did his car have any damage. It dropped him to last in the 16-driver playoff standings with just two races to go in the first round.
When asked what caused the problem by NBC Sports, the seasoned veteran did not hold back.
“I’m sure it’s just crappy parts on the race car like we’ve seen so many times. We haven’t fixed anything. It’s kind of like the safety stuff. We just let it keep going and keep going,” Harvick said. “The car started burning, and as it burned, the flames started coming through the dash. I ran a couple laps, and then as the flame got bigger, it started burning stuff up and I think right there you see all the brake fluid that was probably coming out the brakes. It burned the brake line, but the fire was coming through the dash.
“What a disaster for no reason. We didn’t touch the wall. We didn’t touch a car and here we are in the pits with a burned up car and can’t finish the race during the playoffs because of crappy-ass parts.”
Harvick’s car wasn’t the only one that caught on fire this weekend. J.J. Yeley’s burst in flames as well during Saturday’s Xfinity race.
Scott Miller, senior vice president of competition, responded to Harvick’s remarks Tuesday while on “The Morning Drive” on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.
“To say that NASCAR didn’t care is about as far from the truth as you could get,” Miller said. “That’s really all I have to say about that. I’m not going to get into any kind of back-and-forth contest with Kevin over the airwaves. I think he actually does know we do care.”
Three other cars have also caught on fire this season—Chris Buescher after contact at Indianapolis’s road course, Joey Logano after contact at the same track and Chris Briscoe at Richmond. All three drive Fords like Harvick.
“We’ve been working on different solutions for different things along the way that seem to maybe be the trigger,” Miller said to SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “Obviously, we still have work to do.
“We’re looking at clearances on particularly the Ford exhaust because they seem to be having more trouble with this than the others. There’s a lot of work going on, a lot of collaboration within the industry to get to the bottom of it. We have to get to the bottom of it quick, obviously.”
