Tony Stewart and Kevin Harvick are close friends and former teammates. They appear to be cut from the same cloth: fiery, talented, fearless, champions. Well, you can maybe take fearlessness out of the equation for Harvick.
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Harvick was asked on this past Sunday’s edition of SpeedFreaks his reaction to Stewart’s recent offer to Dale Earnhardt Jr. to drive his 12,000-horsepower, 340-mph Top Fuel dragster. Harvick was asked how he’d respond if Stewart made the same offer to him.
Yes, it’s the dragster Stewart drove to victory at the NHRA 4-Wide Nationals at The Strip on the Las Vegas Motor Speedway in April. This was the three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion’s first Wally in Top Fuel competitions, that too in one of the sport’s most intense formats — four-wide drag racing.
Harvick immediately declined the offer, even though he was passing up the thrill of driving nearly 130 mph faster than he ever went in his NASCAR career.
“Only if he absolutely held me hostage,” Harvick said of getting behind the wheel of Stewart’s dragster. “I don’t really like being out of my comfort zone.”
Harvick is more than happy in his late model “comfort zone”.
“At this point in my life, I like to do the things that I like to do and go the places that I like to go. I don’t like to learn new things. So probably not. I’ll drive my late model. That’s almost outside of my comfort zone at this point, but I’ll do that for fun,” added Harvick.
Stewart made his initial offer recently to Dale Jr., and like Harvick, Junior also wisely turned Smoke down.
“I’ve got a car,” Stewart had said. “I’ll let him take some runs if he wants. It’s an open invitation. But if you watch that whole video, [Harvick] thought about what we did, and he’s like, ‘Whoa’.
Stewart did not find the reaction from Dale Jr. too surprising, considering the whole different dynamic involved driving a dragster, beyond the raw acceleration.
“I thought his reaction was pretty appropriate because it’s kind of what my reaction was the first time I drove Leah’s [his wife, Leah Pruett] car in a test, too. It’s just drastically different than what Dale’s done and what my path was and everything we’ve done in oval track racing and dirt track racing,” said Stewart.
“This is over on Fantasy Island, on its own deal. This is a whole new learning experience. There’s more to it than just driving the car once you hit the throttle. Somebody like me, what I was worried about was hitting the gas and getting to the finish line,” he added.
Stewart then gave an insight into the things that he has to keep a tab on while driving a dragster.
“What I didn’t realize I needed to be focused on was the 20 things in the procedure that have to happen and that you have to do correctly and the same every time. So there’s a lot different mindset that goes into driving drag cars versus oval track cars,” he concluded.
Maybe Stewart would get a volunteer if he extended the invitation to one of the younger drivers in the Cup Series.
