Ron Hornaday returns to his racing roots – Nascar

At KHI, he won two more championships (his four career titles is a series record) and 25 more races between ’05-11.

“A.J. was the easiest,” Hornaday said of his various career stops. “He’s always snappy; he sounded like my dad. I’d tell him, ‘A.J., you’d still be driving a car if you could fit in the window so don’t yell at me no more.’

At DEI, founded by seven-time premier series champion Dale Earnhardt, Hornaday said, “With Dale, come Monday morning you didn’t have to have excuses, he already knew it, (knew) what happened — if you messed up or the truck wasn’t set up right or something like that.

“And I put Kevin (Harvick) in that same category. If our competitiveness wasn’t right there or our performance wasn’t, Kevin would build a new truck and show that we could still do it, go down the right path.

“I owe Kevin and DeLana (Harvick, Kevin’s wife) a lot. … To rejuvenate my Truck Series deal when Kevin started the team and that actually led to a lot of wins. I guess the most memorable was five wins in a row; that was pretty awesome.”

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In ’09, Hornaday and his KHI team reeled off a string of victories that stretched from Milwaukee to Memphis to Kentucky to Indianapolis to Nashville. The streak finally ended with a third-place finish at the series’ next stop at Bristol Motor Speedway.

Recollections of winning the first championship for KHI stand out, he said. “Kevin and DeLana, owning their own team and seeing (Kevin) on the backstretch waiting for me,” he said, “getting out of the truck and getting a big ol’ hug from him.”

Harvick calls Hornaday “one of my racing heroes as I grew up.” He watched the fellow Californian compete at tracks “up and down the state” in the Southwest Tour.

“He has been very successful at what he has done,” Harvick said earlier this year. “He did a lot of that on his own.

“I think as you look at where we were as a company … he made our company legitimate from a racing standpoint. Because you brought in a champion, a winner and he continued to win. …

“He brought that instant approval of a winner and a proven champion and proven winner in himself. We knew we just had to get our stuff right and we were able to be successful together. It was fun to see him be successful at the end of his career.”

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