INDIANAPOLIS -- Nice guys don’t have to finish last. Notorious IndyCar nice guy Jack Harvey truly believes that. Being a decent human away from the track can and should pay dividends. On the track, says Harvey, who finished 10th on the speed charts following Friday’s practice sessions at Mid-Ohio, “I don’t give a (expletive) about it. I’m not out there to make friends.”

But away from the track, the Meyer Shank Racing driver boasts plenty of comrades. After three years of helping build MSR into one of the most exciting young teams in IndyCar, he sees the unit less as a team and more as family. And since crossing the pond, Harvey has found himself an adopted member of an Indianapolis family, which five years ago embraced the Briton as one of its own.

Being a nice guy, Harvey said, is why he's not a lonely expat in America anymore. It’s also one of the biggest reason he’s racing this weekend.

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Racing is in Ann Bolin’s blood. Her family, the Kennedys, started sponsoring Indianapolis 500 cars as far back as the 1930s, and their company, Kennedy Tank & Manufacturing Co., used to make gasoline tanks for the cars. Her brother, Pat Kennedy, has written books about the 500, while Bolin herself has attended the Greatest Spectacle in Racing for 55 years running.

So when someone told her five years ago there was a young race car driver who frequented her gym, Bolin absolutely had to go introduce herself.

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The driver, of course, was a young Jack Harvey, whom she soon learned had only recently moved to America all by himself. He had no family here and few friends.

Bolin learned Harvey was competing in Indy Lights and planned to stay in Indianapolis as long as it took to make his dream come true: to drive and win in the NTT IndyCar Series.

Between their shared love of racing and Harvey being around the same age as her children, Bolin quickly came to see him as another son. She invited him over for dinner with the family, then to Colts games, then to Easter and Thanksgiving.

“I just didn’t want him to be lonely,” Bolin told IndyStar recently. “And I just kept telling him I’d be there for him if he ever needed me, just like his mom was over in England. And we just became buddies. ... He's such a determined kid.”

While Harvey was delighted to have found a family and fanbase in America -- the Kennedy clan went berserk when he conquered the 2015 Freedom 100 -- he was wary of seeming like he was trying to take advantage. Each time Bolin offered to try and raise funds to help his career, Harvey politely declined.

But after finishing second in the Indy Lights championship two years running and narrowly missing out on the accompanying $1 million scholarship, he couldn’t make the leap to IndyCar without help. Without funding, he was forced to sit out the 2016 season.

"He was really down and out, and you know, maybe ready to bag the scene," Bolin recalls.

But with loyal manager Bob Perona by his side, three meetings changed Harvey's racing career forever. The first was with Executive Vice President and CMO of AutoNation, Marc Cannon. The two hit it off almost immediately, and Cannon became the man who would give Harvey his first and biggest break in IndyCar, sponsoring him for the 2017 Indianapolis 500.

Autonation hasn't left Harvey's side since.

The second came as a result of the whim of a Formula One legend. If it weren't for Fernando Alonso deciding to bail on the Monaco Grand Prix and try his hand at the 500, Harvey likely never would have met longtime sports car owner Michael Shank. When Alonso and McLaren announced they were coming, Andretti kicked Harvey over to its sixth car, a joint effort with Michael Shank, who was making his IndyCar debut.

Harvey hasn't a raced an Indy car without Shank since.

And finally, the third meeting, the missing link that has allowed Harvey, Shank and AutoNation to grow their three-race operation in 2016, to six races in 2017 to 10 this year and what they hope to be full season next year -- that came as a result of finally relenting and allowing Bolin to reach out to some friends to raise funds. It was within Bolin’s circle that Harvey first met future team MSR co-owner Jim Meyer.

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Bolin and her friends raised $30,000 for Harvey in 2017. He was blown away. While that's not a difference-making sum in the racing world, it was, as Harvey put, "more generosity than any one man deserves."

Ahead of the 500, Harvey was adamant that he thank all of the people who gave their hard-earned money to help make his dreams come true. One of the people who donated the most money, Bolin informed him, was Meyer.

"I told him, 'You owe him a face-to-face thank you,'" Bolin remembers.

While many people around the Indianapolis area would have recognize that name of the CEO of Sirius XM, Harvey was clueless. He blindly agreed to meet with Meyer, along with a few others, to thank them for their donations.

"That night, I was just showing him pictures of the car," Harvey remembers, "and he asks me, 'Why is that (part of the car) blank?' And I said, 'We're still looking for a primary sponsor.'

"'Well how much is that?'" Meyer asked.

After a brief explanation about how timing would affect the figure -- it costs more six months away from the 500 than six days -- Harvey gave him a number.

At the time, Harvey thought nothing of telling Meyer the exact figure. He'd already donated money, Harvey figured. He wasn't trying to sell Meyer. Might as well just be honest. As Harvey recalls, after learning the figure, Meyer didn't say much about it. But before Harvey left that night, Meyer asked him if he wanted to have brunch the following morning.

"I think he thought I was a fan and he had to do more penance," Meyer laughed.

Having little to do but go to the gym, Harvey agreed, again, having no idea he was about to sit down for a one-on-one meal with a man who could change his life.

The next morning, after the two exchanged brief pleasantries, Harvey recalls, Meyer cut right to the chase. He told Harvey who he was and immediately asked if Harvey had the authority to make a deal for his team.

Harvey, still shell-shocked by what Meyer had just told him, said yes. And right there, on the spot, Meyer offered him the exact amount of money Harvey had said the night before. No more. No less. They signed a contract a couple days later.

"That was the exact amount we needed," Harvey joked, "but looking back I should have asked for like 10 percent more."

Of course, Meyer said, he wasn't just offering up this huge sum of money to be a good Samaritan. He knew Cannon well, and AutoNation and Sirius XM had worked together in the past. A joint Indy 500 effort seemed like a great opportunity.

But there was also Harvey.

"From the moment I met him, I liked the way he handled himself," Meyer said. "Very professional. Very determined. And I love his competitive spirit."

Bolin wasn't surprised Meyer took to Harvey quickly. There's something magnetic about Harvey, she said. His charisma and enthusiasm are contagious. You can't help but want to be a part of what he's doing.

"Jack was such a nobody back in 2014, and now he has such a following -- and it's not just us," Bolin said. "So many people throughout the city like him. There's something there. He's got a talent for not just driving but understanding people and relating to them. Jim Meyer didn't know he was going to sponsor Jack that night they met. He just met him and thought, 'You know, I'm going to talk to this kid. And lo and behold, now he's a car owner.'"

From May 2017 onward, Harvey says, everything just took off. Meyer quickly fell in love with being up close to the action and less than a year later had bought into the team, turning Michael Shank Racing into Meyer Shank Racing and one of the most promising new teams to have joined IndyCar's ranks in recent years.

At first, Harvey admitted, the new arrangement was concerning. He had done a lot of work to secure AutoNation as a personal sponsor. And along with AutoNation, he had brought Meyer and Sirius XM to the table. Now his sponsor was his owner.

"Was I concerned? Honestly, I was," Harvey said. "In that moment; you work so hard to find those people, and then suddenly if Michael knows he’s got a team co-owner and sponsorship, he could have easily turned around and said, 'We don't want Jack in the car,’ and cut me out and go get someone else.

But Meyer and Shank quickly alleviated those fears.

"They said, 'We want you. We want to work with you because we believe in you.' They were great about it. ... There's loyalty from everyone’s part, from me to them and vice versa, to try and put deals together when we each could have gone down other paths. For them to stick with me and try and build this program together, I know it's not like they’d keep me on forever if I wasn't performing, but I know the goal is to put me in the car as a full-time driver.

"I think with me as a driver and Michael and Jim as team owners at MSR, we’re very much all in this together."

Harvey believes the three of them aren't together by coincidence. From the outside, he said, it could look like he was just in the right place at the right time.

That's not what happened, he said. Kindness and ingenuity played an integral role in bringing AutoNation, Sirius XM and Shank's team together.

"Sometimes I think that message gets lost," Harvey said. “I like to tell people, 'Don’t forget, Fernando coming is what pushed us together, and the sponsors I brought to table are what’s allowed us to expand.'

"And I think a lot of that came just with being a decent person. I mean the Sirius sponsorship, I had no idea who he was. I just think you should be polite and generous with as many people as you can. I go back to this a lot, but if Michael and his wife and everyone there didn’t try to make Jim feel special -- not brown-nose him -- but be decent with him and his whole family, this wouldn't have happened."

But now that it did, Harvey is hoping to finish what they started. Scoring the first podium together back in May at the IndyCar Grand Prix was the thrill of a lifetime. But as good as it felt, it only gave them the thirst for more, Meyer said.

Now they have definitive proof they can compete with the series elite. With a little more help to go full time next year, that's exactly what they expect to do.

Harvey’s dream for the future is simple. Win. Win big. And win big with the people who have been with him from the beginning.

“You want to get the best results possible, so good that a few teams want you,” Harvey said. “But because you believe in the program and everything makes sense, you can say, ‘Sorry, guys, I’m staying.’

“I think that’s the dream. If you can look at it in 10 years time and you could say, 'Jack you won an Indy 500; you won a championship and you stayed with Michael and Jim the whole time, how does that sound?' I’d say, 'Thanks very (expletive) much.' That’s the dream.”

Follow IndyStar Motorsports Jim Ayello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram: @jimayello.