Kevin Harvick speculates how mad Richard Childress is with Ty, Austin Dillon

Kevin Harvick knows Richard Childress and the Dillon brothers better than most NASCAR pundits, so he got a kick out of their performance over the weekend during The Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium.

Tempers flared early in the evening, as the Austin Dillon and his brother Ty were in the same qualifying race. They were racing well, until they decided to get aggressive with each other and bump a bit on the track. It led to them both missing the main event, and Harvick believes that couldn’t have made their grandfather in Childress very happy.

“Well, they were rough. I don’t know that we call it racy. They were rough. It started right off the bat with the Dillon brothers,” Harvick stated, via the latest episode of Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour. “They basically ran over each other and screwed themselves up, and got themselves back in the field. I’m sure that that wasn’t a pleasant conversation with Pop-Pop (Richard Childress), because it wasn’t very smart to be running each other over and retaliating.

“Eventually they lost control of the race, lost the lead, lost second and wound up not making the show. And Ty was crashed.”

It’s easy to see why that would grind the gears of Childress. The Dillon brothers both had a shot at the main event in Winston Salem, but they let their emotions get in the way, and they both ended up missing the all-important race in the end.

Kevin Harvick may find it comedic, but Pop-Pop and the crew at Richard Childress Racing certainly won’t. Next time Austin and Ty Dillon see each other on the track, they’ll have to see the forest through the trees, instead of being blinded by rage.

More on Kevin Harvick, the 2025 Clash at Bowman Gray

One wheelman who will feel pretty good about his performance coming off the weekend at Bowman Gray is Shane van Gisbergen, though there’s always room for some improvement.

At the very least, he has now established that he’s perfectly comfortable on a quarter-mile flat track. Kevin Harvick was more than impressed with his performance over the weekend.

“He had a good qualifying run, had a good heat race. Put himself in a good position to be competitive all night and ran a good race,” Harvick added. “I think as we go to some of these other styles of racetrack I think that there will be some learning curve there, but it seems like the Martinsville, Bowman Gray style racetracks are not going to be that issue for SVG.”

Now going up to the Cup Series full time, expectations are high for van Gisbergen. Stemming from a win at Chicago two years ago in the Cup Series, van Gisbergen has been pointed to as a real up-and-comer.

Don’t be surprised if Shane van Gisbergen learns that art quite quickly. He seems to pick up everything else on the race track in a hurry.

— On3’s Thomas Goldkamp contributed to this article.