Kevin Harvick: ‘I was really shocked’ by argument between Denny Hamlin, Marcus Smith

Kevin Harvick said on his “Happy Hour” podcast Tuesday that he was “shocked” to see the heated back-and-forth between Denny Hamlin and Speedway Motorsports CEO Marcus Smith on X last week.

“I was shocked,” Harvick said. “I’ll be honest, I was really shocked when I woke up to see all those tweets. … Maybe there’s more to the relationship that we don’t know, much like we talked about with Martin Truex last week. Is there something internal that’s putting pressure on him? Is there something more of a backstory between these two? I think in the end, they decided that it needed to end and kinda just let it go.

“It was all over the start of some paving issues that they had at Sonoma and Denny fired off and then Marcus fired back and so it was definitely an interesting conversation that I’m sure there is some backstory to the frustration between the two, but maybe not.”

Hamlin’s exchange with Smith started when he responded to a photo shared by NASCAR on Reddit. The photo showed the newly repaved track surface at Sonoma Raceway coming up on Turn 11. The issue forced the cancelation of SRO America testing at the racetrack, one of 11 racetracks owned by Speedway Motorsports.

Hamlin offered a scathing review of Smith’s company.

“When paving on a budget goes wrong,” Hamlin wrote. “NWB will be next.”

The exchange, which lasted over an hour and went on well past midnight Friday morning, quickly got personal. In particular, Smith made light of Hamlin never winning a NASCAR Cup Series championship.

“Following up on my previous post, our team at Speedway Motorsports has an amazing track record for working to exceed expectations. Your nonchalant post is insult to hundreds of people that are dedicated to exceeding expectations for the Racing community, and @NASCAR fans around the world. You’re a negative comments would carry a lot more weight if you had a championship to back them up,” Smith posted. “Good luck in your quest for 2024.”

Denny Hamlin doesn’t feel like Speedway Motorsports has invested in improving some tracks

Smith later deleted his posts and apologized for getting personal with Hamlin, who cosigned Smith’s apology. During Monday’s “Actions Detrimental” podcast, Hamlin elaborated on his frustration with Speedway Motorsports.

“My frustration with SMI is I don’t feel like that investment’s really been made on their part and surely you can combat that with well they did the ROVAL [at Charlotte Motor Speedway] — OK, I think the ROVAL has been played out for a few years. I think everyone in the industry and probably fans would rather have us back on the oval at this point. It was because the oval racing was so stagnant, so they took it upon themselves to do the ROVAL. You can say that they brought back North Wilkesboro — COVID brought back North Wilkesboro. They used COVID funds,” Hamlin said. “They got a bunch of money from the government to do that. So, they always owned North Wilkesboro, but they finally put the investment back in it.

“That was good to see and I’m sure there’s more to the story for sure. We could probably list off a bunch of things that they’ve done in a positive manner. They redid Atlanta. But I look at these tracks and I say, well let’s look at the last three or four paving jobs that SMI has done. And they’ve had to put patches on the track before we even had our racecars on it. Clearly, you’ve got different contractors doing the paving at Sonoma and Marcus said this, ‘Well, we’ve got different pavers at Sonoma than we did at North Wilkesboro. I didn’t even know North Wilkesboro had a problem.’ And so, I’m like, ‘Well, that might be your problem because you don’t have any communication with your people.’ Yes, it did have problems and it probably will in the future.