Kevin Harvick's excitement around 'NASCAR Heat 4' cover centers around son Keelan

Thomas Lott

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Kevin Harvick's excitement around 'NASCAR Heat 4' cover centers around son Keelan image

Kevin Harvick has been on the cover of a video game before. It's not new. But this time around it carries something special.

The 45-time Cup Series winner will grace the cover of "NASCAR Heat 4" alongside Tony Stewart this year. It’s not his first — Harvick was front and center for EA Sports' "NASCAR 2005: Chase for the Cup" — but this one is still unique for him.

Harvick is excited to have the honor, but he is just as thrilled to play the game alongside his 6-year-old son Keelan. The 2014 Cup Series champion didn’t get the chance to share the experience with his son in 2004, but this time he is going to revel in it. 

“My son is so into all the 'NASCAR Heat' games ... so I showed him the cover a couple of weeks ago, and he says ‘I can’t wait to beat you Daddy,” Harvick told Omnisport in a phone interview earlier this week. “He’s like, ‘I don’t care if it’s NASCAR Heat 2, 3 or 4 I’m going to beat you regardless.

“So he thinks it’s cool that I’m on the cover, but the coolest thing in the world to him is to just beat me, so for me that makes it a lot of fun.”

Harvick joins Carl Edwards, Kyle Busch, Chase Elliott, William Byron, Alex Bowman and Jimmie Johnson as cover athletes for the "NASCAR Heat" series.

The 43-year-old fully admits it’s exciting to be on a cover again, but the prospect of playing the game with his son is even more of a joy.

“I’ll pick whoever has aggravated him this week,” Harvick said. “It could be something that somebody did in a truck race, Xfinity race, Cup race, you name it, it could be something that they did, I’ll just pick that guy just because I know that he’s aggravated with that guy on that particular week.

“So we have a great time with it and enjoy the game.”

But as much as Harvick will like to annoy his son from time to time, he also sees the value of learning from the game.

He said his son is already picking up things and figuring out what he wants to do next to get better.

“The way that he talks about it is like, you know, it’s a real race,” he said. “And it is for a lot of people, because they would never get the opportunity to not only get on the cover, but to drive the car and be in a race. And for him he understands and sees things that happen on the race track and he’ll come back and he’ll say ‘I lost the race because of this,’ you know, he’s got the typical driver excuses already even when it comes to video games.”

"NASCAR Heat 4" officially releases in September when the playoffs begin. Harvick currently sits in fourth in the Cup Series standings and is projected as of now as seventh place in the playoffs.

He is still looking for his first win of the year — this is the longest drought without a win to start the season for Harvick since 2017 when he didn’t win his first event until the 16th race at Sonoma — but his team has seen improvement of late and he’s in a good place mentally despite the failure to reach victory lane.

“I’ve been on all sides of this mess,” Harvick said. “From a mental standpoint I can deal with it just about any way possible. Obviously you’d rather win, but you can’t force it. You have to be a part of the process and getting things back together, and sometimes that’s more intriguing to me at this point than it is when it’s going easy.

“When you’re winning like we did last year it’s almost easy because everything’s going right and smooth and you know what you want, you know what you need and we didn’t necessarily know that when we started the year.”

Harvick has 10/1 odds to win the Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona International Speedway on Saturday.

The race will start at 7:40 p.m. ET.

Thomas Lott