Kevin Harvick reacts to Daniel Suarez car fire at Daytona, speaks from experience

It was an eventful week at Daytona, with Harrison Burton securing a surprise win to earn his way into the playoffs and Daniel Suarez watching his car become completely engulfed in flames.

The latter was one of the scarier moments of the race, with some nervous breath-holding until Suarez was able to exit the vehicle safely.

The incident is causing at least one NASCAR insider to speak out on the state of the paneling on cars.

“We’ve seen a lot of these cars catch on fire, and I think that some of the fire retardant of the body panels and a lot of the panels inside the car probably should be looked at with everything that happened in this particular situation,” Kevin Harvick said on the Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour podcast. “I don’t know that that should end a car’s race.”

The Daniel Suarez car fire appeared to happen after Denny Hamlin stopped and accidentally sparked a trail of fuel that found its way back to the No. 99. Within moments, Suarez’s rear was fully aflame.

Whether NASCAR’s R&D teams take a closer look and find anything with the panels remains to be seen. But the Daniel Suarez incident should be seen as a warning to take a look.

“So it’s a very unique situation, which is how we get to a lot of these scenarios of learning,” Harvick said. “And I think that this is definitely something that we need to learn from. We didn’t learn from the foam in the doors and the heat shields and there was no fire retardant on the foam that was in the doors, and we just let five or six cars burn up and finally I’d had enough. And we had the ‘crappy ass parts’ comment when it happened at Darlington and ended my race.

“They had worked on it a little bit, but from that point forward they worked on it a lot more and have solved those issues since. So I would just question how long some of that stuff will actually burn and what the fire retardant of the body panels and things are and what that is. As we’ve seen the mudflaps catch on fire in the past from burnouts.”

That was the main thing Harvick wanted to see NASCAR do, is take a look at the parts involved in the Daniel Suarez car fire and test them to determine appropriate safety measures.

“I think everybody would want to see the burn rate as to what those, the flashpoint is for a lot of those panels and pieces that caught on fire, because that shouldn’t happen,” Harvick said.