Kevin Harvick's Happy Hour presented by NASCAR on FOX - Ray Evernham Interview

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

On episode 14 of "Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour” get ready for an exhilarating deep dive into the world of motorsports as NASCAR Legend Ray Evernham joins Kevin Harvick for an unforgettable conversation. Ray kicks off the discussion by sharing exciting insights into the release of his highly anticipated new book, giving viewers an exclusive look into his unwavering passion for racing and more. With a career steeped in the adrenaline-fueled world of NASCAR, Ray offers a unique perspective on the sport, drawing from his extensive experience and unparalleled expertise. As the conversation unfolds, Ray delves into the fascinating story of how he first got involved with IROC, providing behind-the-scenes anecdotes and reflections on the challenges and triumphs he encountered along the way. From there, he takes viewers on a journey through his time working for Hendrick Companies, offering a glimpse into the inner workings of one of NASCAR's most iconic teams. But the conversation doesn't stop there. Ray shares his profound knowledge of racing and cars, offering valuable insights and tips for aspiring drivers and enthusiasts alike. And of course, no discussion with Ray Evernham would be complete without a mention of his special relationship with NASCAR legend Jeff Gordon, a bond that has left an indelible mark on the sport. Don't miss out on this exhilarating episode packed with expert analysis and all the thrilling moments you love from the world of NASCAR! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I think it was probably 2000. We would go out there and they just let the bush cars and the cup cars go out there together when they would have the open test. The first car that passed me was Jeff Gordon. I thought, man, I have absolutely made it. Welcome to Kevin Harvick's Happy Hour, presented by NASCAR on Fox. We encourage you to follow us on YouTube or follow us on any of the social handles at Harvick Happy Pod. And today we have Ray Everingham in the studio.

Thanks for coming, Ray. Happy to be here. No pun. Yeah. Well, it's always fun for me to be able to bring someone like you and that's been a part of our sport for a long time. But today, you're coming in. You wrote a book. Raised new book. Trophies and scars.

Trophies and scars. Yeah. Tell us why now. Well, you and I were talking. First of all, I want to say thank you for having me on it. It's good. You and I never get a chance to really talk. We were talking some racing and things.

so great to be here. But it was 50 years next year of motorsports for me and, you know, from knocking around the modifies and trying to do all that in New Jersey, getting lucky going IROC, really wanted to go IndyCar racing, got fortunate enough to work with Roger Penske, Jay Signore, and then went through a little bit of a turmoil, being injured, ended up because of your friend, Mike Joy,

took Alan Kowicki into hire me, didn't last long there and did some things and ended up with this kid Jeff Gordon and ended up being a crew chief when I never even wanted, We wanted to be a crew chief, and we told a lot of those stories of how I got there, and then told a lot of the things building the 24 team, the teamwork, what was behind that, what was the success, and how we built the cars and probably dispelled some rumors. People are going to go like, oh, I thought they had this.

You know, like poor T-Rex has grown way out past what it really was. And talk about the wheel coming off at Charlotte and some of the private conversations that I had with Mr. France, things like that. Well, it's always fun to hear the inside stories of everything that has happened in our sport. And then as we've been able to do this show, to be able to break down some of those things with the people inside of different teams or different moments. And you know, you wrote the book and we talked a little bit before the show. What do you hope is the thing that comes out of writing your book that what's the thing that you want people to recognize about your career and the things that you've done? You're in the Hall of Fame.

You've won cup crew chiefs. And now you've spent a long time taking the time to write the book. What do you want? What do you think people are going to get out of hearing all these stories? and why you wrote the book when you did? The first people that I'd like to get something out of it to know who I am, what I was thinking, and how I've evolved as a person is my own family

because I don't have to tell you when you're trying to build a career and you're racing, you're away from your family a lot. You miss a lot of weddings. You miss funerals. You miss parties and things like that. So hopefully family will understand my drive and what I was doing, my children.

But more so I want to, I always used the term ease, you know, and then it's not for Evanham, but that entertainment, you want people to read the book and enjoy it, you know, get some good stories out of it. And in education, we, I've been really fortunate to have worked with some great business people, some great coaches. And we tried to tie a little lesson to every, every chapter, because as you know, you know, the 2014 built up, but it also came apart. So the things that tear a deal apart sometimes are as important to learn as the things that keep it together. So at the end of the day, I hope people look, hey, okay, I understand what he was thinking.

I don't have to agree with him. He's still an idiot. But, you know, they enjoyed the book, or at least they understood how I've had to evolve as my career has changed. Well, we won't clarify whether these questions, your answers to these questions are in the book, but I have some questions of my own. And maybe we would go back and we'd have to add a chapter or two to the book. I think for me, tell me how you got into racing.

where it started, how you developed this passion for motorsports, because you just told us that you stock cars, any cars, you didn't have the path that you probably chose to start with. Where did this passion for racing start? And how did it turn into what it did in the end with the career that you had? Well, I really don't know because I've never wanted to do anything else. My dad was, my dad was an awesome, awesome athlete. You know, he's in the book there. Like, he played semi-pro ball and just he was great. But I love. loved cars. And I used to drive this little plastic go-kart around when I was like four years old, and then the wheels finally fell off it, so they bought me a metal one. You know, at least I could drive

that. But went to a midget race, a midget car race, midgets and modifies at a place called Old Bridge Stadium in New Jersey. And I just fell in love with it. Then I had an uncle who used to, he worked for Ford Motor Company, and he'd go to the local modified races and sprint cars and midgets, all open-wheel stuff, dirt and pavement. And I just, you know, I'd just work towards being able to build my own cars and bugged, I would stop at the gas stations and talk to the guys that had them. And I started working with a guy helping him when I was like 15. And, you know, it just, it was something I wanted to do. I had my plan was, I was going to win the Indy 500. You know, that was, because Mario And Reddy was right up the road there in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. And, and he,

he was a big star. And certainly it's like, look, I'm going to, I'm going to go indie car racing. So I have no idea how I ended up down in NASCAR land. I mean, I guess I look back and I know, That was not my plan. Yeah, and I grew up the same way. I grew up, I grew up in Bakersfield. Yeah, I was in the Mears. I raced with Clint and Casey and go-karts. Rick and Roger, Roger Jr.

We're always at the racetrack all the time. And all I ever wanted to do was race an Indy car and win the Indy 500. And my dad was totally against everything that had to do with stock cars. We watched Stock Cars on the... Well, he was a drag racing, right? He was against the Indy cars. I'm sorry, I misstated that. He didn't drive anything.

My dad was a fireman and worked on cars on the side and had this passion, much like you did, to work on cars. And we wound up in go-carts and race go-carts. But he wanted nothing to do with Indy cars once it got to the point of, hey, do I go to a car? Do I go to a midget? And I think that's very interesting that you say that. And I think when you look back on that, I guess cart would have been the premier IndyCar series at that particular time, right? It was still USAC when I was growing up.

Yeah, still USAC when I was growing up. But it was very expensive to get into the midgets and whatnot. And the local stock cars had street stocks. You know, you would just show me your street stock, right? You know, to their arms and, you know, and all that. You know, my street stock was a 62 Chevy Nova, you know, and they had a class that I could afford. So I ended up running stock cars on pavement because that was what I could afford to do.

Yeah. Did you ever race a midget? I did. You know, I actually won a midget race at Wall Stadium. That was my home track. So, you know, I got at the end pavement, have not, I drove things. They're called speedsters. It's like a midget. It was a little bit bigger than a midget. Four-cylinder Chrysler in it. And I did win a dirt race in them. After I retired from crew chief and I went back racing for a while. That's fun. And when you talk about crew chiefing, the path to that obviously came through your short track. It came through your passion for racing. but at some point that had to evolve into heading down the NASCAR path. How did you wind up getting started at IROC? Tell me about your first interview at IROC.

Well, we heard Roger Penske was moving IROC to New Jersey, not far from where I lived. And I was like, bingo, Roger's going to meet me. I'm going to get the test drive for him. I'm going to be teammates with Mears and Sullivan. This is a done deal, right? So I went there and knocked on the door, and Barbara Sigel, who was Jay Signorey's wife was there by herself. Jay was away somewhere else. And she sat me down. I talked to her and she's like, okay, you know, she actually hired me. She said, all right, we need, and I was the

second person in there. They needed the shop set up and all that. And working with Jay and doing the I Rock series, met a lot of great people, but learned a, learned an awful lot with them as well. And never got to drive Roger Penske's Indy car, which I thank him for now because he probably saved my life. But started racing on my own. I was going to race an archa car. I had an archa car. I had my modifies. We had a midget.

You know, had gathered a bunch of sponsorship in like 1991 to do things over. One wall stadium right off the bat, ran second at Flemington, and then boom, I get hurt, head injury. And, you know, I had had my own shop. So I was doing work for people. And at that time, one of those people was a young man named Jeff Gordon. I did three or four races with him.

But, you know, he was racing. I was racing. And when I was hurt, I had to get a job. I mean, I had to get a job. And Mike Joy said, talked Alan Kowicki into hiring me. And I went down there, and Alan and I were like, oil and water. We, we fought. I mean, we literally, like the stuff we were talking about,

we were literally throwing stuff at one another. Like, we were throwing tape measures back and forth. The day before the Daytona 500, we get into like a shove and match, almost a fist fight. I quit. He fires me, you know, the whole deal. Walking out the gate, I am walking out the gate of Daytona. and I bumped into Preston Miller and Lee Moore's from Ford.

They said, where are you going? I said, I'm going home. They said, hotel. I said, no, New Jersey. I just quit, got fired, whatever. And they said, wait, wait, wait, come on back. You know, we know that you work with Jeff. We put you over at Bill Davis.

So Ford put me over at Bill Davises. And we started sitting on polls and winning races immediately. And then along comes Rick Hendrick and hires Jeff. And it was incredible. It happened so fast. And in my meeting with Rick Hendrick, I thought that I was interviewing to be, you know, kind of team manager because that's where I was good at. But I'm the chassis guy, right? I'm the spring shock. Set your car up. I'm that guy. And I said, well, you know, we can hire a crew chief, maybe Andy Petrie or somebody like that. He goes, no, no, you're going to be the crew chief.

And I said, I don't want to be the crew chief, Mr. Hendrick. I've got no, I've got no, you're going to be the crew chief. Jeff wants you to be the crew chief. I said, I really don't want to be the crew chief. He said, well, that's the only job I got, take her to leave it. You're going to be the crew chief. Wow. And when you go back, when you go back to going to Bill Davises and walking out of that racetrack and going back to work with Jeff, you'd obviously seen him drive. He got in a stock car and that went pretty well for him right off the bat. And so you guys go to Hendrick. You go to take this new job that you didn't know if you were ready for. How did you start building that team? Because, you know, what you see at Hendrick Motorsports now is not what it was then. So who was in charge? Were you helping build the team or did you immediately go into that role? Did you just step in and say, hey, I need to get my footing on the ground here and figure out how this works or were you a part of building the team from the very beginning? You know, the way that went, Mr. Hendrick and a guy named Jim Johnson, who, not Jimmy Johnson, the driver, but Jim Johnson was the general manager at that time. They were like, look, there's going to be your building. Build it, you know, how you want. Randy Dorton's going to build your motors. You know, these guys at the car shop will build your cars like you want them. You go higher.

Here's the number of people you can have and here's your budget. And they stepped out of the way and they just let us go at it. And I brought some things that I had learned at I Rock about building cars and efficiencies with man hours and getting things done. Stock cars were heavy at that time. And again, you got to remember I came from the modifies. And I was like, ooh, we had lighting these babies up. So we started and they were like, you know, you get that. Well, that won't work.

That's going to break, you know. So we used a lot of engineering practices and whatnot to lighten the cars up and do things. But I will tell you that even though I fought with a few of the old timers there at Hendrick, once they started to see how much lighter and how much faster our cars could be, they really gave us a lot of room to move. And when I told them that I didn't want to use mechanics to do the pit crew, they were like, what? You know, these guys work on the car.

You got to let them try. I said, that's exactly why we can't have them doing it because they're working on the car 14, 16 hours a day. We got no time for pit practice and we can gain something. And that was something that Mr. Hendricks supported me on because that put us over on headcount, bringing extra people in. And at that time, they didn't get paid a bunch. I mean, they'd get like 50 bucks a day in a sandwich. Right. But it still put us over on headcounts.

So they let me do what I wanted to do with that team. And I decided to use a professional sports team and split it up into like, honestly, we split it up into offense, defense and special teams. You know, special teams being the pit, the pit crew. you know, defense, the guys, the mechanical guys that built the cars, made sure nothing fell off. And the offensive guys were kind of our R&D shop with me included. And we did a lot of stuff back then that people would look at and go, well, you can't do that. And I was like, why can't we do that? Because nobody else does that.

So, well, that's no reason not to do it, you know, as long as it's faster. So we were involved specifically a lot in the development of the Hendrick car itself. His cars were beautiful. They were beautifully fabricated cars. but the geometry and the weight and all the things we needed to tune on, you know, and it's tough from, you figure, I'm one minute telling them I don't want to be a crew chief, I don't have experience. And the next minute I'm telling them they got to change a bunch of stuff on their cars. Right. So did you already have an engineer on the staff at that particular time or they're just not named engineers?

Because when I started at RCR and the way that we tested, it was pretty much a torch and a saw and a welder. and you started moving things around in the program, but you went to the racetrack and you just cut the car apart to try the next thing. Is that how you guys went about it at that time, or was it even precise then? It was, obviously, we had some of that, but Brian Weitzel, who's still there, you know,

Jim Johnson's like, you can't have an engineer, you show me an engineer's going to make that car go faster, and I was like, yeah, you know, because, again, I'd come from Penske. Yeah. You know, they knew about the engineering stuff. And so he said, if you could hire an engineer, you know, that's going to put you one guy over. So Brian Whitesell was an engineer and came and

was the truck driver for one year. He drove the truck and he did all of the engineering. What I used them for largely the first year was the processes and record keeping. And, you know, we would take a look at, you know, bringing consistency. Because there just was no consistency when I got there. You know, cars tread with, camera games, you know, bump, all that stuff. And then, and so Brian and I would work on that in his spare time. And he would, he drove the truck for a year and did my engineering. And then when the Hendrick folks started to see that, how important engineering was, they went out and hired like Rex Stump and they brought in Eddie Dickerson to work on the cars. And Steve, Steve Levitt from up north came down to build cars. They started really bringing in some incredible

car builders. So you have all these mechanics and engineers and all this brain trust of how to structure of the organization. How did Jeff fit into that puzzle and how big of a part was, was Jeff of development of what was better or worse? Or did you guys just plug him in there and say, hey, drive it? Kevin, I'll tell you, through my years at IROC, dealing with Foyd's Andretti, Unsurz, you know, the Formula One guys, you know, Moss, Hicks, Bell, all those guys, they all have something special. They feel something different. And you have this too, right? You're one of those guys that drive out of a bigger windshield. And that's the way Jeff Gordon was.

We kid Jeff to this day, you know, like he's not allowed to touch tools or whatever. He's learning, right? He doesn't know. He didn't know one thing from another. But he could give you a lap as good as any computer. He made it so easy for me to change the car or adjust it. You know, he would tell me things like, yeah, when I get off in the corner there, I feel like the weight transfers from this wheel.

It's over on this wheel. It gets a plant and then it rolls back here. So picking apart the, you know, like shocks and arrow and stuff like that was, it was incredibly easy because he would give such detail. And, you know, I do talk about that in the book. Like from Friday to Sunday, I can never complain about, you know, Jeff not being involved, not being whatever. ever, because with the team, he left that up to me. But I don't know that at that time, without having onboard data, that I could have ever worked with anybody better than him.

I have told several people that because when I came to Stuart Haas Racing, our alliance was with Hendrick Motorsports. And we immediately realized that Jeff was, that was the car that we looked at because we could see all the things that were going on. So we developed this relationship with how we looked at things and with myself and Rodney and Allen and everything that was happening at Hendrick Motorsports at that particular time. But one of the things that I always tell people, when Jimmy Johnson started to not have the results that he had, it was because Jeff Gordon left.

And I truly believe that because I felt like when I got to Stuart Haas Racing that Jeff Gordon was the reason he was the one that pushed all the buttons, whether it was in the engine shop or the chassis shop or the engineering department or whatever was off at that particular point. And what you just said pretty much verifies what I saw because I just felt like Jeff was always the one that could make that department get better and help them guide them. And I think that's a piece that a lot of drivers don't realize is how much they guide the ship with the things that they say and what they relate to the people because we're problem solvers. But I always felt like when Jeff left, that was the biggest problem that Jimmy had because

of the fact he had never had to really develop anything at Hendrick Motorsports because Jeff was so ingrained with what you guys did. And that carried all the way through. And I don't know what you think about that comment. But Jeff was an integral part of the way that things progressed. And he is. You know, it's not like he was going to go to the fab shop and say, we need to do this. But he was so good about analyzing what he felt.

And, you know, as we talked about the bigger windshield meeting, you know, race drivers, great race drivers like yourself, have a different view of time, what you say. And I've always said this. You know, they asked about Michael Jordan. And if you don't think it's a different view of time. they can compute so much more than time. Like when I'm driving, I'm doing everything I can do to save my life and not crash, right? That's my job, right? That's when I'm out there.

So I come in and I, somebody else's got to fix my car, right? But with guys like you, Jeff, so analytical. And, you know, when you talk about a guy like Jimmy, Jimmy was just bad, fast driver. But as, you know, Jimmy was used to the trucks and all that stuff. Like he learned a lot of travel. And the lower they got those cars and the less they traveled, I think it was hard. harder for him. You know, and I think there were some people that helped and in some people, you know, it, it hurt. But that, um, transition period of a car going from, let's say, static to

straight away to being loaded up in the corner and then it loads up here and it changes here in transition and it changes again. That's something Jeff Gordon could pick out like unbelievable. And to me, that was everything about setting the car up. You know, the only problem we ever had with that was his rookie year like at Rockingham, he's like, tight in the middle, tighten the middle. And I'm like, man,

I can't tighten the middle, tighten the middle. And then I'm just terribly loose off. Tighten the middle. I said, look, walk me down here and show me,

because I don't, I don't understand. We walked down in the corner of one and two at Rockingham there, and I forget, there's a sign, you know,

like it was a sponsor sign, and it's right smack in the middle of the corner. And he says, right there, right here on entry. I was like, whoa,

whoa, that's not entry, that's the middle. He looks at me, goes, no, that's entry because that's where I let off. I said, well, maybe that's the problem. The rest of the guys are letting off back here. So once we got on that, you know, it was easier to fix the car. Yeah, and that's a trust thing. And that's the thing that crew chiefs and drivers that trust each other because we've had a lot of conversations about Chris Gavehart and Denny Hamlin lately.

And if Chris Gavehart tells Denny Hamlin to drive it off of a cliff, he's going to drive it off of a cliff. he's going to drive it off of a cliff. And there's just, when you have that crew chief driver team relationship that is at its peak, it's when the driver doesn't get mad that he's being told that he's doing something wrong. It's when the crew chief doesn't get mad that the driver's telling him he's do something wrong because they have that trust in each other that you just, you can't buy and you can't create. It's not something that you can just turn on and off. And that, when you tell Jeff that he's driving in too far, I bet he went out there the next time and just let off sooner, didn't he?

A little bit. Then he'd go back into, but I used to have to take him down and watch other people. Like if someone was faster than him, I was like, watch where he's letting off. Yeah. You know, like Martinsville, it took us years to do that. And he finally, boom, you know, it clicked. You know, that communication, that trust, you know, that trust, honesty, respect, that thing is, that strong, makes a strong relationship, whether that's your family or your wife, whether you, your team. but that is very important because as much as I thought I knew or the much I would do, if he said, I didn't like that. Even if I was really sure it was going to work or be better, I wouldn't put it in because

he didn't like it, which means it wasn't going to be better. And I'd have to find another way to give him that feeling without doing that. He hated moving to the panered bar. You got to ask him about this. Like I would move the, I would raise the pantered bar one round, which is like 60,000 across the rear end, which is nothing, right? And he'd be like, now it's too much. Go half a round.

And I was like, that's nothing. He's all, I can feel it. You know, and I'm like, okay, you know, but I had to give him what he wanted. And in his mind, if I didn't, if I went ahead and raised that track bar, then he knew I wouldn't have faith in him when I did, you know, so I had to listen to him. What was the best BS story you ever told Jeff Gordon on the radio that turned out pretty good? Oh, I don't know if it turned out good. We had a, when, you know, as he was coming up, and of course, I'm in, I'm coaching.

You want to be positive and whatever. And I remember we were Atlanta somewhere. We're running like terrible. And I was like, no, I was like, your lap times are good. Like those guys are, you know, those guys are, you know, they're all backing up to you. And he pushes the button. He's like, Ray, why is it that you tell me that all time that I'm catching them and I can see them driving away out the windshield, you know?

And another time we had a, we had a little blowout on the radio at Vegas. And it was kind of funny because we couldn't, we couldn't stay angry. Like after the race, he'd come in and he'd look at me like a kid, like, you know, like my little brother, you know, he's a little kid. And I would laugh or he would laugh. So we would just start laughing. But that day, the tourists were kicking our butt. Man, they were killing us, right? When we weren't used to that, and 98, when they came out with that tourists.

And we're back there running like 11th, which, you know. In the world. He's, he's screaming this, that. And oh, my God. And I said, okay, then come in. and we'll pit. We can't pit. You know if we pit, we'll go a lap down. I said, well, then shut up and drive it because I can't run alongside it and fix it. And then he didn't say another word to me. Like, you know, he picked up probably a couple tens for a little bit, you know, but he didn't

send. And afterwards, he's like, and I just laughed at him. I was like, bud, what do you want do? They kicked our butt, you know? Like, we got beat. Like, we didn't make a top 10 today. One of my coolest career moments was actually at Vegas. Because if you remember, I think it was probably 2000, we would go out there and they just let the bush cars and the cup cars go out there together when they would have the open test. The first car that passed me was Jeff Gordon. I thought, man, I have absolutely made it. I'm on the same race track as Jeff Gordon. Let's go back to the, let's go back to the T-Rex car in that all-star race. Because how much time and why did you develop that car? And what was it that?

NASCAR was like, don't bring that back? Or is that list too long? No, it's not, you know, that car was really Mr. Hendricks' idea. So Mr. Hendrick, at that time, you know, we'd won the championship in 95, Terry won at 96, you know, and we're developing stuff. He's got Rex Stump there, who was, you know, a great Gary Aker, you know, our engineering, you know, group would just build in cars. So they had the R&D shop, and they said, look, take all of your ideas and give them to Rex and Cheech Gardy at that time was a fabricator there. And they're going to build a car using all your ideas. And, you know, we've got to stay ahead. And that's the way Rick is. You know, he was big on the next stage of the motor. Yeah, we're winning, but what are we doing in three or four months? You know, what's the next stage? And that's the way he was with the cars. It was constant development. So Rex and those guys take all our ideas, you know, we're going to stiff in the chassis. And, you know, we're going to raise the floor pan up and we're going to move the shocks outside the chassis. And we're going to do all this. We take the thing to the racetrack. And I mean, it's like, it's a turd.

We can't go anywhere with it. Like, Jeff's like, yeah, it's like half a second slower than the rest of our stuff. And Terry Labani, I think Terry took the Texas. He and Gary DeHart came back to like, yeah, you know, but so we were going to Charlotte. And, you know, Charlotte used to be we'd practice and practice and practice and practice. You know, we practiced a week before and then we'd go back. Well, three o'clock in the afternoon, you might as well run your, you know, your Tahoe around there. Right.

Because you're not learning anything because Charlotte is just tricky. So it's like, fire T-Rex up there, you know, because I'm thinking, you know, they're going to yell if we don't test this thing. So you go out there, and it's about six or seven-tenths off of our favorite car at that time was blacker, you know. So, and he's like, I don't know. I said, let me try something. So I decided to try putting like a modified setup in it.

So, you know, back then we used to run more like a 1,400 in the left front and 2,000 on the right front and probably a, 350 and a 400, right? I take a pair, I think we put a pair of 1600s in the front, and we put a pair of 450s in the back. We dropped the track bar, and I said, give me the biggest sway bar we got, inch and three A's the biggest one we had at that time. And, you know, we sent him out there,

and I said, I have no idea what this is going to do. He goes out there, and, you know, Brian Weitzel's on the truck with me, and he clips his, you know, I clip my stopwatch, and I looked at it, and it was like, same time, right? And Brian's life, the tents were the same. The second was a second faster. Wow. And we were like, Jeff comes in, he goes, what was that? He said, I don't know. Let's go think about this and work on it. And what we found out at that time was, you know, we dropped the nose, got the air dam on the ground, that car had the race floor pan, got the air out from under the bottom of it, a pair of 450s kept a spoiler up in the air, and it was all arrow. So we come back, we're going to run it into Winston.

We were going to run into 600. And he comes off of the corner and hits pit road. He's running, you know, they had the radar gun. He's running like 150 something when he hits pit road and stands back on the gas. And he goes sliding by us with all, we're in the pits. He's sliding by us with all four tires locked up, you know, when they used to do that three-lap crew deal. And he's yelling, the brakes aren't working. The brakes aren't working.

And I was like, they're smoking, bud. We'll see you in a minute. You know? Right. So he comes in. So we got to start last. We start last in this thing. And everybody said, oh, they won all three segments. We didn't win all three segments with that car.

We won all three segments of the Winston in 95. And but, you know, the, he came through the pack. And it was, it was really good. And then it was a game because remember, they used to reverse. Yeah. Right. So we didn't run as hard as we probably needed to in the second one. And I think he started third in the, in the, in the, in the,

the last segment. And when they dropped the green flag, he went by who was ever first and second. And during that last eight to ten laps segments, he ran laps more than a second faster than the field and just drove away. And had nothing to do with the car. Yeah. It's all about set up. Well, it was all it was all set up. And, you know, and Jeff was at his best then, you know, I always tell everybody, look, if somebody else was driving that car, it probably would have still been legal. But we go up and do all the, hey, the eunuchel toast, and we come back and bust her out and says, Mr. France wants to see you. And I'm like, okay. So I'm thinking, hey, Bill wants to have a beer with me, tell him a great job, you know, big crowd, whatever.

I go up and there. And this was probably before your time when the hauler used to have the bat phone in it, the, had the real, just had a push-up on the phone. I got thrown out. I got thrown out. You got thrown out. Yeah. Well, I go in there, and he's sitting there, Mr. France, and he goes, see that phone right there? I said, yes, sir. He said, you need to pick it up and call your boss and tell him that car is illegal. And I said, no, it's not illegal.

You know, it passed inspection. And the inspectors looked out at the whole time and everything. And he goes, he used to smoke, you know, the winces hitting. And he goes, won't be tomorrow. That was the end of T-Rex, you know. But I get it.

There was, I think there was a line of car owners saying that, you know, because the, you know, the design of the cage and the design of the bars of that car was so different. Everybody thought it was that, but it wasn't. Yeah. It wound up being mechanical.

So I've got two more questions before we run out of time. I understand that you're a karaoke guy. Is that true? It is, unfortunately. And I don't know. I don't know why. And I'm the worst karaoke guy in the world because I think I'm good. Yeah.

I know I'm not. What's your song? Oh, man. You know, it used to be brandy. You're a fine girl. But now I've been working on some of the new country stuff. You know, I'm trying to, you know, as I'm getting older, my voice is getting a little raspy. So here and there, I'm trying to get some new material.

You know? Did you ever have any karaoke parties for the teams? Oh, God, yeah. Did you make everybody sing? Oh, absolutely. Everybody had to sing. Jeff Gordon had to sing. Like, anybody knew. Like, we did it right through, you know, when I had the Dodge team, like, we'd bring it a new person. And if you were a new person at the Christmas party, you had to sing. How's it? How's it? Oh, gosh. He still sings. Oh, I've heard it. Yeah. Oh, I've heard it. What we were is that? He took me to this little bar. What is it? The song from the first Top Gun. Oh my God. You've lost that love and feeling.

That's Jeff's go-to. That is his go-to. All right. So what was your first car? How much did it cost? And where did it go? It was a 1965 Malibu SS. What a $396 in it.

I paid $900 for it. And I traded it for a 1956 Chevy drag car. That was kind of, that sounds very similar to how I got my first race car. Well, you know what? I learned today is I didn't need these note cards because we only got through about one page. And I think we're going to have to, we're going to have, I have a ton more questions about many other segments, but I think I need to read the book first before, before we do this again. Thanks for coming. Well, thank you. Thank you. We appreciate you watching Kevin,

Havick's Happy Hour, presented by NASCAR and Fox. You can join us and watch us anywhere that you pick up YouTube. You can follow us on Harvick Happy Pod anywhere on social media. And thanks for watching today. We'll see you next week.