Author: Mike Hembree
Date: Sept. 18, 2015
RICHMOND, Va. — Kevin Harvick and Rodney Childers stunned many in the motor sports community by winning the NASCAR Sprint Cup championship in their first season at Stewart-Haas Racing.
They won’t be able to do that again.
Harvick’s consistency — he often has the fastest car each week — and Childers’ soft-spoken, mild-mannered style have them starting the Chase for the Sprint Sup at Chicagoland Speedway this weekend as the championship favorite.
They have shown this season that 2014 was no fluke, boasting a record that includes two victories, a remarkable 10 second-place finishes (the most since Bobby Allison in 1972) and lead-lap finishes in all but four of the first 26 events. Harvick’s ability to stay out of trouble has given him a better season, so far, than last year, when he won his first title.
Count Greg Zipadelli, competition director at Stewart-Haas Racing, among those who are not surprised. He recognized Childers’ abilities several years ago.
“When I was a crew chief (at Joe Gibbs Racing), I thought he did a great job with David Reutimann,” Zipadelli told USA TODAY Sports. “I thought I saw a lot of consistency. I never saw him get frustrated. I thought he did a good job with what he had. He didn’t have the resources a lot of other teams had.”
In 2009, Childers, then a crew chief at Michael Waltrip Racing, was working with less equipment and resources than high-level Cup teams. He and Reutimann scored MWR’s first victory in the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway, then struck again with Reutimann the next season at Chicagoland — wins that definitely fit under the “upset” category.
In 2012-13, Childers was the pit boss of MWR’s No. 55 operation with a carousel of drivers. The most notable was veteran Mark Martin, who repeatedly poured praise on Childers, often bemoaning the fact that he wasn’t able to get to victory lane despite numerous close calls in Childers-prepared cars.
“Being around Mark changed the way I looked at all of it,” Childers told USA TODAY Sports. “He made me believe in myself and believe that I could do it. To have someone like him tell me that if I got with the right person I could win a championship — it made me believe that I could do it. It made me push forward to make that happen.”
With Zipadelli, team co-owner Tony Stewart and Harvick mounting a strong offensive for their first year together, they talked Childers into moving to SHR for the 2014 season. Magic followed.
Childers and Harvick seemed to click almost immediately, and they sparkled during the Chase — winning three races including the finale — and finally scoring Harvick’s first championship after a decade of alternating near-misses and disappointment at Richard Childress Racing.
Steve Addington, formerly a crew chief at SHR and now competition director and crew chief at HScott Motorsports, said it was critical for Harvick and Childers to land on the same page.
“He and Kevin hit it off immediately,” Addington told USA TODAY Sports. “That’s the biggest part of it — believing in each other. When the leader has all his guys believing in him and following him and having his back, it’s really huge from a confidence standpoint. It moves through the whole race team.”
Keeping it together
NASCAR crew chiefs have a wild matrix of responsibilities. The job differs from team to team, but crew chiefs with top teams usually are in charge of personnel, car preparation, simulation and its real-world adaption, short- and long-term goals and, perhaps most visibly, race strategy.
With so many plates spinning at once, even the best sometimes lose control, but Childers seems calm to the extreme, an attribute that can pay off in the heat of the Chase’s elimination rounds.
“Rodney does a really good job paying attention to details and being able to take everything and kind of put it all together,” Zipadelli said. “He doesn’t get revved up. He doesn’t get excited. When things aren’t going right or the speed isn’t there, he just methodically works through the changes they have kind of scripted for the weekend. They usually end up somewhere close.”
Childers, 39, was given virtual carte blanche at SHR, and all but two of the No. 4 team members were new to the organization. There were changes late last year when pit crew members from Stewart’s team moved over to work for Harvick and Childers after Stewart missed the Chase. Those crewmen stayed with the No. 4 this year.
So Childers has “his” guys, one of racing’s strongest front offices, a front-line driver in Harvick and the backing of big-name sponsors. Everything else, he said, is a matter of controlling the chaos that is a natural byproduct of operating a team at stock car racing’s high point.
“The biggest thing is just staying relaxed with all of it and trusting the people around you,” Childers said in attempting to explain his success. “You have to always have your head in the game, even if you’re sitting at home watching a movie with the family. You have to be thinking about it all the time.
“There are so many different things that you have to do right. You have to control it, whether it’s from the personnel side, the car side, the engineering side. You have to think about every piece and part of it.”
For some, that’s too much thinking. For Childers, it seems all in a day’s work.
“I’ve just been fortunate to be able to do that,” he said. “I don’t know how I got that way. I couldn’t tell somebody else how to get that way. I’ve just been able to handle a lot of things in my head at one time and be able to control all of it.”
Molding to the job
In his perfect world, Childers would be driving race cars instead of building them. He raced go-carts successfully as a kid before moving into Late Model racing and eventually — ever so briefly — into the Xfinity Series. He ran one race on NASCAR’s second-tier circuit in 2000 but soon came to the conclusion that his racing future was waiting on the other side of the pit wall.
Childers watched and learned in jobs with several teams before accompanying Reutimann into victory lane in 2009. He said he didn’t attempt to pattern himself after any particular crew chief.
“Although I’ve definitely seen some that I didn’t want to be like,” he said, smiling. “You just have to grow up and be your own person. You learn from everybody. You take every person you’ve been around or watched on TV, and you think, ‘How can I do that better?’ You’re going to have good days and bad days. You learn from the mistakes. Those first few years of crew-chiefing, I made more mistakes than I did good decisions. You try to get better every day.”
Now, Childers begins the push toward another championship.
To view this article on USAToday.com, click here.