Things are not the way they used to be in the NASCAR Cup Series.
And Rodney Childers has had to find out the hard way in his first year working on the Next Gen car.
Childers, a former racer himself, has been around awhile. This season marks the 46-year-old’s 18th in the Cup Series serving as a crew chief and his ninth paired with Kevin Harvick on Stewart-Haas Racing’s No. 4 car.
Meshing his old school racing knowledge with that of SHR’s group of specifically trained engineers to figure out what the Next Gen car can do has been a challenge.
“You’ve kind of hit it on the head there,” Childers said Wednesday during a Zoom press conference when SPEED SPORT asked what the generational dynamic had been like for the team so far in 2022.
“Maybe a guy that’s fresh out of school comes in and thinks that this car is perfectly normal and the same stuff that he studied in college and is just gung-ho about working on it and all those things,” Childers said.
But for Childers, it’s been “mentally” a “tough” process re-working his knowledge base that’s decades old.
For reference, Childers’ first race as a NASCAR crew chief was the June 2005 Cup race at Michigan Int’l Speedway.
“For somebody that’s been in the Cup Series for 20 years and has built their own cars and sit there and cut quarter panels off and replace them, and fenders off and replaced them, and changed this and changed that – just detail cars to death every single week, it’s tough,” Childers said. “You’re just trying to figure out ‘what do I work on’ and your whole pace of things each week has changed this year. Your whole layout of everything that you’ve done for 20 years is different.”
But the 2014 Cup champion believes he’s up to the task.
“I’m not gonna say that I can’t do it,” Childers said. “I definitely can do it, it’s just different and your mind has to kind of get trained to that. For me, I have great engineers that I’ve kind of been around for a long time and we all believe in each other and we went through good things and bad things this year, but we’ve made all those decisions together. “
Childers assessment comes with the No. 4 team winless through the first 19 races of the season.
Harvick has four top-five finishes with a best result of second at Richmond (Va.) Raceway.
At this point in the Next Gen car’s maiden campaign, Childers “can’t say that I’ve been too surprised about” how the car has performed.
“I feel like most of it has gone exactly how I thought it was gonna go, even down to specific racetracks and how it was gonna race,” Childers said.
The crew chief even said the season’s rash of wheels coming off was something he expected.
“That was something we talked about last November and December of how all that was gonna go and how many times it’s gonna happen, so I think all of it has kind of gone to plan for me and what I had in my head,” Childers said. “The only thing that hasn’t gone to plan is us going to victory lane, so we’ve got to get our hands around that and get focused on that and hopefully do that soon.”
Without any surprises of note produced by the Next Gen car, Childers observed that the biggest hurdles for him in learning its intricacies have been in “the simple things.” It’s here where Childers again touches on how he views the car compared to his younger contemporaries.
“Somebody that’s fresh out of college they would think that the independent suspension in the back was simple, moving this mount to this position or this spacer to this position is gonna do this to the geometry in the rear of different things,” Childers said. “For me, all that stuff was truck arms and a track bar. I knew exactly what to do and when to do it. I knew what each track needed from that standpoint and those things are consistent with the old car, too, but you had that long history and you had that confidence of what to change and what to do.”
Where with the previous generation of car, the decision-making process for making adjustments “was kind of all on me,” Childers now gets more input from his engineers.
“Then he’s got to make that change of where this spacer needs to go and where this mount needs to go and all those kinds of things,” Childers said.
Childers, who has 38 career wins in the Cup Series, observed that the shocks in the Next Gen car have posed a challenge.
“For somebody like me, I built shocks back in the day and I went through that and knew every little detail about them and the new stuff is all built the same pretty much and you just turn the screws where you want every week and the same goes with the notes with shocks” Childers said. “These shocks always worked at this track and these shocks always worked at that track, and it doesn’t matter anymore.
“You just need to forget about that stuff and worry about the new car. … I feel like we’re finally getting to that point where we’ve got our arms around it and we can keep moving forward.”