Yahoo News Kevin Harvick will donate $50K to charity if a Cup driver beats Kyle Busch in Truck Series race
Kevin Harvick’s $50,000 bounty for Tuesday night’s Truck Series race has a charitable twist.
Harvick said Tuesday morning that he’s still offering the prize for any Cup Series driver who would beat Kyle Busch in the race at Charlotte. But instead of giving that money straight to the driver, Harvick will donate that cash to charity in the name of the winning driver because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The bounty is still on for tonight’s @NASCAR_Trucks race. However, in the current environment, the $50,000 donation will be made in the name of the cup driver who is eligible and beats @KyleBusch to a covid-19 relief effort of their choice.
— Kevin Harvick (@KevinHarvick) May 26, 2020
The bounty was originally offered before the NASCAR season was halted for 10 weeks because of the pandemic. Tuesday night’s Truck Series race at Las Vegas is the first truck race since Feb. 21, and it was won by Busch. He has 15 wins in 26 Truck Series starts since the start of the 2015 season.
Harvick’s bounty offer — and the prospect of a matching prize from Marcus Lemonis, the CEO of series sponsor Gander Outdoors — helped incentivize Chase Elliott to enter Tuesday night’s race. He’s running the No. 24 truck and starts 26th, 10 spots behind Busch.
This has my full support, and is far more important right now. I’m excited to get over there and run, our @iRacing truck turned out great 👍🏼 https://t.co/nsLRlUuiRQ
— Chase Elliott (@chaseelliott) May 26, 2020
John Hunter Nemechek is also entered in the race and Erik Jones was going to run it as well. But Jones isn’t part of the 40-truck field because the team he was driving for was ineligible for the race based on NASCAR’s starting grid rules. NASCAR set the field via a points formula because the race is being run without practice and qualifying.
Busch is competing in the race for his own Kyle Busch Motorsports team. He runs a limited allotment of Truck Series races per year to help his team on the sponsorship front and has noted numerous times how driving his own trucks helps keep his team financially secure.
But Busch’s presence in both the Truck Series and Xfinity Series continues to be a polarizing topic even as NASCAR has limited the number of lower series races that he and other Cup Series drivers can run. Busch won Monday night’s Xfinity Series race and is the only driver running all seven NASCAR races in 11 days from May 17-27.
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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.
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