Brant James

USA TODAY Sports

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Kevin Harvick, the 2014 Sprint Cup champion, sees NASCAR’s economy from multiple angles. He is a driver, was a team owner in the Camping World Truck Series and Xfinity Series and owns a celebrity management company that represents athletes and entertainers.

And though the new charter ownership model recently enacted by NASCAR — coupled with the Race Team Alliance, Team Owners Council and a drivers council formed last year to discuss issues with NASCAR — evokes a landscape where groups more often than ever unite to maximize representation or wield financial leverage, Harvick doesn’t believe a driver union is likely.

“I don’t know that a union is ever something that will ever happen with the way that our contracts and everything and the way that things are structured,” Harvick told USA TODAY Sports. “I don’t see that that would be productive anyway. I think that that would just raise a lot of eyebrows and cause a lot of tension.”

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This would seemingly be the time, with owners and drivers now forced to reopen existing contracts because a change in purse distribution has rendered the way many drivers are compensated.

But even the word, union, has been near taboo in the series since its inception, with two attempts quashed by the series.

In 1961, a movement involving The Teamsters resulted in drivers Tim Flock and Curtis Turner receiving lifetime bans — Turner’s was eventually rescinded — and in 1969 another group led by Richard Petty united to protest safety conditions at Talladega Superspeedway. The inception of the Race Team Alliance of owners in 2014, followed by the more recent forays into association and negotiation, and then the chartering movements displayed a shift from the independent contractor model to more of collective effort.

Drivers, Harvick said, need to monitor their own well-being independently, especially in their early contracts.

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“In sports in general, when you look at young athletes or people who just want to get somewhere — and I don’t think it’s just relative to NASCAR in general — there’s just this feeling of people who want to sign people up because they’re vulnerable and don’t know a lot about it,” Harvick said. “They just want to get on a bike and ride or they want to get in a car and drive and the next thing you know, they’re not making money or their rights are all signed way for a really long time. They get in a bad contract. Those are all things, really from a management side of thing, more from a younger generation.

"And they’ve got to want to help themselves, too, because they don’t understand a lot of the things that are happening to them and the things they are doing to their career that they might not ever be able to get out of. You look at a lot of guys who have come into this sport or any sport, and they have one bad situation, and they don’t have the right representation, they don’t have the right lawyers, and they don’t have the right people surrounding them, and the next thing you know, one situation is handled bad and poof, they’re gone.”

Ryan Blaney, a 22-year-old Team Penske product undertaking his first full-time Sprint Cup season driving for the Wood Brothers, said meticulous representation and a belief in his owner prevented any concerns.

“As a kid, when you sign your first contract, like I did in 2012, you’ll kind of do anything just to get a chance and now when you sign contracts, you maybe look at that a little bit, but we’re still trying to make it,” Blaney said. “A younger driver, there’s always someone else waiting to take your place and you can’t get too greedy on the other side of it, on the financial side. So we kind of take what we can get. But Penske and the Wood Brothers have always been very fair to me. There’s really been no issues when it comes to that.”

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