Tony Stewart joined Kevin Harvick last week, on his Happy Hour YouTube show, and recalled one of the more legendary pranks the two drivers pulled on each other one year while they were both active NASCAR Cup Series drivers.
“I remember some guy, there’s a driver in the series that went in and changed my alarm clock one morning,” Stewart recalled, to Harvick. “I got up two hours early and was dressed, the one day that they didn’t actually have to wake me up to get dressed, I’m dressed and ready to go and I’m walking outside, getting ready to get on the golf cart to go in the pits.
“They’re like, ‘What are you doing?’ I’m like, ‘Well, I’m actually on time today for once. I’m proud of that.’ They said, ‘You’re two hours early.’ I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ And then everybody’s laughing. Well, it just happened to be you, of course. We were parked next to each other. You went in and changed my clock.”
Harvick snuck into the motor home, and literally changed Stewart’s clock so it went off two hours early, but that wasn’t the end of the mutual pranks.
“So we have the relationship, a good enough relationship that I just ran right in the motor home,” Stewart continued. “Well, DeLana (Harvick, Kevin’s wife) is still in bed. You’re in the very back in the shower. I just climbed in bed with DeLana, with my uniform on.
“I don’t know if she had clothes on or not but climbed in bed and you’re in there. You were more worried about covering up that little thing you were covering up. I’m then laying in bed with your wife. But that’s — that’s the stuff that, at this point in my life, that’s the stuff that I love and cherish.”
To his point, as Stewart wraps up his time as a team owner in NASCAR, these are the relationships and memories he cherished the most from his time in NASCAR. Stewart drove for Harvick in the Xfinity Series on several occasions, as part of Kevin Harvick Inc., and Harvick spent the final 10 years of his Cup career driving for Stewart at Stewart-Haas Racing, which will close down at the end of this season.
“It’s the stories, the memories, the fun that we had along the way,” Stewart said. “Being at Stewart Haas a week ago and seeing those people and, and, you know, knowing that a lot of those friendships are still going to carry on after this season’s over, that’s what really means the world to me.”