“It’s absolutely ridiculous that we just went to an unrestricted mile-and-a-half and they qualified wide open.”
On the latest episode of his Happy Hour podcast, Kevin Harvick had something to say. Largely unprovoked, and while on a different topic, the 2014 Cup Series champion had a tangent to go on about the racing product over the weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
A combination of a softer left side tire and cooler temperatures for the spring race allowed drivers to be wide-open on the throttle all the way around the race track. That’s to say nothing, generally, of the current car which has a wide contact patch on its tires.
“What in the world do we need to do to get more horsepower,” Harvick said. “This screams horsepower to me. This is not a good scenario.”
Racers will near universally tell you that they all want enough power to simultaneously wear out the life of their tires but also force them to lift in the corners to display their talents and the technical prowess of their cars.
Since 2019, but arguably as far back as 2015, has incrementally lessened the horsepower to engines that can produce numbers over 900. At one point, from 2019 to 2021, Cup Series cars were limited to 500 horsepower on intermediate length track races with NASCAR citing both competition reasons that created closer deltas to engine manufacturers not wanting to join the sport with higher powered regulations.
Harvick says he has seen enough.
“I have heard all the things about different manufacturers and different this or that and all those stories,” Harvick said. “But I haven’t … just put some damn power in the cars. Wide open qualifying at an unrestricted mile-and-a-half race track is dumb.”
Harvick wasn’t done.
“If your shoes gave you blisters on your foot and they felt uncomfortable all the time, would you keep putting your same shoes on,” Harvick said. “Why can’t we just fix the damn problem? We spend million of dollars on aerodynamics and now we’re wide-open.
“They made the left side tire just that much softer and they’re just hammer down.”
Harvick said any increase would be a step in the right direction. Cup cars currently use a tapered spacer that have engine putting out 670 horsepower for a platform that can still produce over 900 unrestricted. It’s just a matter of changing out the spacer to one that allows for more power.
