Family way agrees with Harvick

In June 2010, after Kevin Harvick had spun him out at the end of a Sprint Cup race at Pocono, Pa., a young and restless Joey Logano, steam coming from his ears, famously said it probably wasn't Harvick's fault because "his wife wears the firesuit in the family."

He was referring to Harvick's wife DeLana, who, like many NASCAR spouses and girlfriends, sits atop the pit box on racing weekends, where their role generally is to look good and put a little check mark on the score sheet every time their hubbies or boyfriends motor past.

Now DeLana Harvick is 15 weeks pregnant, and so I asked her husband, who was in Las Vegas Monday to promote the March 9-11 NASCAR weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway -- as they say, good tickets are still available -- if those firesuits come in maternity sizes, or will DeLana just borrow one of Jimmy Spencer's old ones?

"No, I don't think so," laughed the driver of the Richard Childress Racing No. 29 Budweiser Chevrolet, after throwing the bones on a Bellagio craps table with local media and some fans who won a sweepstakes. "DeLana is fighting me on it a little bit, but I'm pretty much moving her from the top of the pit box. She can sit behind it in a director's chair, but I don't want her going up and down the steps."

Harvick was wearing a white oxford shirt with a starched collar and subtle Budweiser logos on the left breast, pressed jeans and charcoal loafers. He was standing on the patio of the new Hyde nightclub at Bellagio, which I thought might be named for Harry Hyde, who won 56 races as a NASCAR crew chief and inspired Robert Duvall's character in "Days of Thunder."

Alas, there weren't any peanut shells on the floor, trucker caps were frowned upon and a bottle of Ace of Spades champagne by Armand de Brignac cost $1,750, so it couldn't have been Harry Hyde's place, or even former UNLV football coach's Harvey Hyde's place.

Earlier Monday, during lunch at Joe's Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab at the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas Motor Speedway president Chris Powell bestowed upon the proud papa-to-be a Onesie, sippy cup and bib, each adorned with the LVMS logo instead of the Budweiser logo, which seemed like a proper compromise.

DeLana Harvick's tummy also explains the unusual behavior at Kevin Harvick Inc., headquarters, which no longer exists. KHI, which competed in NASCAR's Nationwide and Camping World Truck Series, has been folded into Childress' operation. The sale of Harvick's 80,000-square foot race shop in Kernersville, N.C., prompted all kinds of rumors, including one that the Harvicks were getting a divorce.

Uh, not exactly.

"Everybody was so weirded out, wondering why were we selling the race team, why were we changing everything," Harvick said. "We just didn't think we could be the parents we needed to be, and run a company like that, and do my full-time job."

Perhaps it was appropriate that the 2007 Daytona 500 winner would choose Las Vegas to discuss DeLana's pregnancy at length because this is sort of where it all started for the Harvicks, who were married here during the 2001 NASCAR weekend. That capped a three-week period in young Kevin Harvick's life -- he was 25 then -- that only can be described as whirlwind.

First, he was named to replace Dale Earnhardt, who was killed on the last lap of the Daytona 500. Whoa. Then he got married. Then he won his first race, at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

Whirlwind? I guess. Like the one that dropped Dorothy's house on the Wicked Witch of the East.

"Sh-e-e-w," Harvick said, combining "Whew!"  and ... well ... another expletive, to form a third expletive. He said his marriage to DeLana, who also has motor oil in her veins -- her late father, John Paul Linville, drove in the old Busch Series during the 1980s -- was a silver lining in a giant grey cloud.

"We had been through so much in the two weeks before that and to get everybody's mind off that ... really, that's what got us through the entire 2001 season," he said.

So now Kevin Michael Harvick of Bakersfield, Calif., is going to be a dad and he's excited about that, and that he soon will have something to talk about with the other new NASCAR fathers, such as Carl Edwards and Matt Kenseth and Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon and Juan Pablo Montoya and Ryan Newman and Sam Hornish and Jamie McMurray and Elliott Sadler, other than who had the line going into Turn 2.

It would seem that the family of which NASCAR always speaks is getting bigger by the trimester.

Perhaps this is what NASCAR president Mike Helton really had in mind when he said, "Boys, have at it."

Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.