Kevin Harvick has been known to let his emotions get the best of him over the years.
Although the 46-year-old has appeared to become a bit more mild-mannered in the latter part of his NASCAR career. However, he ain’t afraid to rail against NASCAR when it comes to safety, and last night, he put them on notice again.
His #4 Busch Light car caught fire at the Cookout 500 in Darlington, South Carolina.
During the final stage of the race last night, he said flames were coming through his dash two laps before he pulled over, as the fire began to get increasingly worse.
No accident, no crash, no nothing… just a fire that knocked him out of the first playoff race through no fault of his own.
And boy, he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind during the post-race interview:
“I’m sure it’s just crappy parts on the race car like we’ve seen so many times. They haven’t fixed anything. It’s kind of like the safety stuff. We just let it keep going and keep going. The car started burning and as it burned the flames started coming through the dash.
I ran a couple laps and then as the flame got bigger it started burning stuff up and I think right there you see all the brake fluid that was probably coming out the brakes and part of the brake line, but the fire was coming through the dash.
What a disaster for no reason. We didn’t touch the wall. We didn’t touch a car and here we are in the pits with a burned up car and we can’t finish the race during the playoffs because of crappy-ass parts.”
According to Yahoo Sports, the new cars in 2022 have been built with primarily single-source parts, in an effort to lower costs instead of teams building their own specific parts for cars, and fires have been a major concern with this move.
At least four cars have caught fire so far in the 2022 season through 27 races.
Fires haven’t been the only safety concern, as Kurt Busch has been sidelined with a concussion for quite some time after an odd crash after his car backed into the wall at Pocono.
Needless to say, it’ll be intriguing to see what other concerns are raised throughout the rest of the season.
He also commented on the photo with a sarcastic, “Is the caution out yet.”
Unfortunately for Harvick, he’s got some ground to make up if he wants to make it to the next round of the playoffs.
