ATLANTA — Back on the Monday of March 12, 2001, Atlanta picked up its morning paper and read of many sporting splendors. Down in Florida, Braves pitcher John Smoltz made a second start in his recovery from elbow surgery. Lefty Driesell’s Georgia State basketball team had just earned an invite to the Big Dance (as unfathomable as it seems now, both Georgia and Georgia Tech also were included). The late and lightly lamented Thrashers had skated to a 3-3 tie with Calgary during the city’s second failed NHL marriage.
But it was at the car fights south of town in Hampton where real story gold had been spun.
There, driving a hybrid that was part-roaring stock car, part-hearse bearing the still warm memory of Dale Earnhardt, 25-year-old Kevin Harvick won a race. His first NASCAR Cup race win. In a car that had been set up for the legendary Earnhardt before his death only weeks before at the Daytona 500. On the track where the great “Intimidator” Earnhardt had amassed nine wins and built a worshipful following that so badly needed remedy.
The late AJC columnist Furman Bisher likened the scene to “a fable that neither Aesop nor the Brothers Grimm would have tried to sell with a straight face.”
Time does what it must, slowly, ceaselessly turning the grinding wheel of change, and here we are Sunday some 22 years later with Harvick contemplating his final run at Atlanta Motor Speedway. A now 47-year-old has decided it best to move on to the broadcast booth and the owner’s office and the family den at the end of this season while the getting’s good.
The Quaker State 400 night race will faithfully serve as Harvick’s last Atlanta hoorah. In advance of the start, Richard Childress, Harvick’s team owner in ‘01 (the driver moved to Stewart-Haas Racing in 2014), will serve as grand marshal and circle the track in that No. 29 car that won 22 years ago.
“It’s going to be really cool to see the fans’ reaction, see the pit crews, all the teams’ reactions to seeing that car go around the track again,” Childress told the AJC last week.
For just a little while more, Harvick will run in the thick exhaust cloud of Earnhardt’s legacy. The tortured beginning of a 60-win NASCAR Cup career always will be the first paragraph of Harvick’s resume.
Harvick was thrown into the most searing driver’s seat ever when Childress turned to him after racing’s biggest and brightest figure, a seven-time series champion, died in the most public way — fatally crashing near the lead on the last lap of the Daytona 500. By that night, Childress had decided to give his guy running on the Triple-A circuit a battlefield promotion. “I had dealt with him in the Xfinity series and watched him run the trucks. Kevin had the mental capability to handle all situations that he was put in,” Childress said.
Harvick has described the enormity of a time, “where my first press conference as a Cup Series driver was the biggest press conference I would ever have in my career, where my first moments were my biggest moments.”
Just three weeks after Earnhardt’s death, in a car that had been repainted and renumbered — from the famous No. 3 to No. 29 — but was still Earnhardt’s at its core, Harvick slung around the last turn at the front. It practically required a CSI team to forensically decide that Harvick had beaten Jeff Gordon to the finish line by inches. Fans could be seen climbing catch fences in joyful abandon. Harvick then spun around and, a la Earnhardt, performed a backwards victory lap while holding three fingers out the car.
“Kevin winning Atlanta was one of the biggest healing moments in the sport,” Childress said. In the past 40 years, Childress has won 116 Cup races on his way to the NASCAR Hall of Fame. He said that one spring race in Atlanta would easily fit into his top five.
No one recognizes the bizarro world nature of his racing life better than Harvick.
“I always tell people that things happened backward in my career,” he has said. “They all knew my name first. And then you had to figure out how to earn who you were from that point forward. Then you had to walk everything back in order to be yourself. Everybody knew your name because of Dale’s passing and getting in his car. And then winning the race — that was kind of the moment that solidified the fact that you could do it.”
On Sunday, they’ll spend a little time celebrating a man capable of winning a no-win situation.
Harvick’s greatest success may have come in racing out front of Earnhardt’s shadow. So much more than a place-holder in a time of need, Harvick won a lot more races after March 2001. Sixty of them as of today — along with a 2014 series championship. That stands him as the sport’s second-leading active driver, behind Kyle Busch (63).
Yet to win this season, his seven top-10 and four top-5 finishes have displayed enough consistency to place him seventh in regular-season points.
“I think that’s the most important part, going out on your own terms the last year and try to do what we’ve done the last 22 years on the Cup side and that’s be competitive,” Harvick has said. “I think that’s the most respectful thing to the fans and the people and the sport – to not just go out there and cash it in but to go out there and to try to win.”
Harvick learned to master the old, tired asphalt of Atlanta Motor Speedway, winning three times in 35 starts, leading for a total of 1,360 laps (that’s 2,040 miles out front). The repaving and reconfiguration of the track last year doesn’t suit him the same. “I think everybody’s hoping for a tremendous grip loss in a really short amount of time,” he has said.
“I wish we had the old Atlanta just for his sake, with it being his last year,” said Chase Briscoe, Harvick’s Stewart-Haas teammate. “I think you could take him there in any type of car, any year, and he would be battling for the win.” Track officials are unlikely, however, to flatten the turns and lay down a layer of skunky asphalt between now and Sunday for old time’s sake.
A Childress car hasn’t won at Atlanta since ‘01. Obviously the owner has certain priorities Sunday.
But, if one of his guys can’t finish first, never let it be said that he’d be incapable of recognizing the delicious symmetry of one last Harvick victory at the site of his first, most iconic one.
Said Childress: “I can promise you this, at Atlanta if we don’t win, I would rejoice to see Kevin win it. I would be the first one to go to the winner’s circle.”
