Kevin Harvick has proposed eliminating one of either preseason Busch Clash or the All-Star Race, NASCAR’s two non-points exhibition races.
He made the argument during a conversation with NASCAR scheduling executive Ben Kennedy, the grandson of NASCAR founder Bill France.
The chat took place on the latest episode of his Happy Hour show.
“When you look at going and doing — well, let’s just take the special event races, the All-Star Race and The Clash. Do you ever see a time where you combine those?” Harvick said. “Because I look at the length of the schedule right now, and my goodness, it’s not as hard for the drivers, as it is for the team guys, and sometimes I feel like, when you talk about the logistics of what they have to do to get from Michigan to Mexico City, you know, you think about all of those things.
“But when I look at the All-Star Race and The Clash, I look at — they’re very similar. Do you ever think about combining those types of races, to open up another weekend?”
Kennedy said the topic has come up but that such a decision would require input from a lot of stakeholders.
That includes Speedway Motorsports, who owns the date for the All Star Race, as NASCAR owns the date for The Clash
“You know, we’ve talked about it,” Kennedy explained. “I think The Clash in particular being two weeks before the Daytona 500 makes sense on many levels. It’s an exhibition race. I think we’ve always said to ourselves, and we’ve heard from our fans, that we want our first points race to be at Daytona, to be at our biggest event of the year. So, kind of keeping that in mind, if you have any of these exhibition races, like The Clash, I think that’s a huge opportunity for us, to promote the Daytona 500.
“To that point, I think the All-Star Race has taken on so many different evolutions over the past few years. We were at Charlotte. Eventually we went to Bristol, went to Texas, and now we’re at North Wilkesboro. So, something we also talk about with Speedway Motorsports is what does the future evolution of the All-Star Race look like? I think there’s a theory around the All-Star Race, every weekend is the All-Star Race. We have our biggest names and our biggest drivers on all of these races. It’s a different format, and it’s a format similar to The Clash.
“So, you know, we’ve talked about all sorts of different concepts of, you know, do you continue to have the exhibition race? Do you look at something different? We’ve still got to work on what that’s going to be, but I do think that there’s an opportunity we could look at with SM.”
