TRUCKS: KHI Pulling Out Of Series

Camping World Trucks

TRUCKS: KHI Pulling Out Of Series

Kevin Harvick Inc.'s days of fielding race vehicles are about to end...

Mike Hembree | Posted September 09, 2011 Richmond, VA

Team co-owners Kevin Harvick (Left) and wife DeLana (Right) will not field Camping World Truck Series teams in 2012. (Photo: Getty Images)

One of the strongest teams in the history of the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series will be no more.

Team owner Kevin Harvick announced Friday that Kevin Harvick Inc. will not field trucks in the series next season.

“It’s just a tough model business-wise,” Harvick said Friday at Richmond International Raceway. “We’ve scrimped and scraped and got the sponsorship and things you need. General Motors has been a great supporter, but from a business standpoint, sometimes you have to make decisions on what you want to do. It just doesn’t make sense.”

KHI will no longer be involved in fielding race vehicles, Harvick said. It will serve as a headquarters for his personal business operations and his racing fan club.

“This will allow me to spend more time with our Cup team,” Harvick said. “It takes an extreme amount of pressure off me as a driver and owner. When you look at the personal time we get back, it’s a tremendous amount of time. There are way more positives in the whole thing than there are negatives. It’s been a lot of work.

“There were no financial issues. We were making it all work, but sometimes you feel like you have to get something out of it. In the end, it’s business.”

KHI had 140 employees, Harvick said. He had announced recently that KHI’s Nationwide operation would merge with Richard Childress Racing next season and said that some of those workers could find jobs at RCR.

Harvick and his wife, DeLana, started KHI in 2001, the same season he started driving the Sprint Cup Series full-time for RCR. Harvick drove in KHI’s first race at Richmond International Raceway, finishing second.

From that inauspicious start – the team began in a storage unit the Harvicks owned, KHI blossomed into a formidable NASCAR operation that fielded three Truck Series teams and two Nationwide Series entries and seemed on a course to become a Sprint Cup operation.

The operation, based in an 80,000-square-foot facility in Kernersville, N.C., won Truck Series championships with driver Ron Hornaday Jr. in 2007 and 2009. Harvick said the shop will be sold.

Ron Hornaday has won two Truck Series titles for KHI. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Harvick scored the team’s first Truck win in 2002 at Phoenix International Raceway.

The team ran the Truck circuit full-time for the first time in 2004, with Matt Crafton behind the wheel. He finished sixth in series points. That year also marked KHI’s Nationwide Series debut, as Tony Stewart drove a team entry to a fifth-place finish at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

The Nationwide program expanded to full time in 2005, and Stewart scored KHI’s first series win in the season opener at Daytona International Speedway.

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 29 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.

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Mike Hembree

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