It wasn’t a lack of opportunity outside his current team that swung Kasey Kahne’s mind in favor of retirement.
It would be easy to suspect that Kasey Kahne made his recent retirement announcement at least in part because he was bummed out about his current driving situation. Kahne is a consummate professional and would never say this in public, but let’s be real: It’s more than a little step down for a guy who used to be the premier Dodge driver in NASCAR and spent years with Hendrick Motorsports to be plying his trade with Leavine Family Racing.
Because Kahne hasn’t finished in the top 10 of the year-end standings in Cup Series points since 2012, it would be equally understandable to assume that he had no better offers than returning to LFR if he wanted to continue his NASCAR career. Yet that apparently is not the case.
Jim Utter of Motorsport.com cites multiple sources who told him that Kahne was approached by a representative of Stewart-Haas Racing about a potential ride in 2019, but that his mind was already set on retiring. The ride in question would be the No. 41 Ford, which is now the subject of intense speculation as Kurt Busch’s future with the team appears to be very much up in the air after this season.
It’s curious, though, to think that Stewart-Haas Racing would want to swap Kurt Busch for Kahne, considering that the former has performed better than the latter wherever they’ve been for most of this decade. On top of that, Kahne is also only a few years younger than the elder Busch brther, so it wouldn’t even be a change for SHR to get younger.
In any case, the report suggests that Kahne definitely had more than one option when it came to continuing to race next season. The fact that he’s not choosing to pursue any of them means we can take him 100 percent at his word when he says his decision to hang up his firesuit came down to wanting to spend more time with his family, and you have to respect his commitment to that.