Did Kevin Harvick’s Retirement Lead to Demise of Tony Stewart’s NASCAR Team?

The slump that Stewart-Haas Racing (SHR) slipped into in 2021 has resulted in the team’s owners deciding to dissolve it after the 2024 season. The announcement from Tony Stewart came on Tuesday and will end the 16-year journey that the outfit had in the NASCAR Cup Series. One does not have to look deep to see that the retirement of Kevin Harvick was the final blow to the team’s hopes of resurgence.

The icon joined SHR back in 2014 and immediately won a championship. Over the next six years – till 2020 – he collected 30 wins and served as a support system for the team’s efforts along with crew chief Rodney Childers. As it appears, his departure at the end of  2023 has led to Stewart and Gene Haas losing hope and choosing to stop the bleeding.

Talking about his impact on the team on the Harvick Happy Hour podcast, Harvick says, “I think the people around that #4 car over the last 10 years are really what held that company together. I think that company was held together by the success of the #4 car, Rodney Childers, and that group of people.”

“I think once the backbone of all that went away, it started poking some holes in what happens at the top side of upper management and everything that goes with running a race team.” In a different lens, even Harvick’s final years with SHR were not as worthy of the standards he set early on. The Next Gen added to the struggles and the team won just four races from 2021 to 2023.

“It is a full-time job”: Harvick finds a flaw in the way Tony Stewart ran Stewart-Haas Racing

Continuing his analysis of the team’s downfall, Harvick noted that Stewart and Haas should have run the team differently. He said, “It’s a full-time job. It’s a 24X7 job. It’s not a knock on owners Gene and Tony. They were great to me but they’re kind of hands-off owners and have people in place to do their jobs.”

“I think in today’s day and age you have to have people that are involved with the authority to do what they need to do with the people and the things inside of the company to make it run properly.” He continued to reiterate that fixing the team did not seem like a hard job at the time he left since a lot of capable people were involved.