He moved to Michael Waltrip Racing for the 2009 season and scored his first win with David Reutimann in that year’s Coca-Cola 600 — a rain-delayed affair which ended on Memorial Day Monday. Childers won again with Reutimann at Chicagoland Speedway in 2010 and with Brian Vickers in 2013 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
Childers remembers MWR having a good engineering program and its own simulation, along with a great deal of factory support, but he thinks that perhaps his belief in the engineering tools available helped his teams finally find victory lane.
Upon transitioning to SHR for 2014, Childers immediately used all the engineering equipment available to its maximum potential. Those tools, combined with Harvick’s talent behind the wheel and an opportunity for a new team to hire the best people possible, led to instant success.
“On the 4 team we’ve been super fortunate to just have really good people that you don’t have to babysit, you don’t have to continue to tell things, you can tell them once and it sticks and you move on,” Childers said. “I think there are a few different sides of being a crew chief. You can be a hard-ass all the time or you can be a guy that can pat people on the back, tell them they’re doing a good job, but also push them to be better and there’s a fine mixture there.
“It’s probably a little bit more of a family atmosphere, I wouldn’t say that everybody on the team’s best friends by any means, but everybody pushes each other to be the best that they can be and everybody expects to be the best.”
Among the individuals who has worked alongside Childers for many years is shock specialist Mike McCarville. He has been with Childers every season but one since the end of 2005.
“Rodney is just a super guy, he’s a fun guy to be around, but he also has a very serious side as well,” McCarville said.
“He has a very keen eye and is very meticulous in what he wants done to a race car,” he continued. “If I’ve learned one thing from him over all these years it is Rodney’s all about the details on a race car. He instills a great deal of pride in us for what we do and it just shows on him because we bring top-notch race cars each and every week.”
According to McCarville, while Childers expects the best from his team, he also remains on an even plane, rarely getting upset. His temperament, willingness to learn and mind in constant motion are some of the ideal traits for a crew chief. Yet, Childers thinks his strength has always been setting up the cars themselves, and his background as a driver often transfers to the pit box as he watches Harvick on the track.
“I can kind of picture what’s going on with the car before he says anything,” Childers said. “I really like having an in-car camera all the time, everybody thinks that’s crazy probably, but I just watch the roof camera the whole race and I can tell if he’s loose or tight, what he’s fighting.”
Harvick and Childers have developed a close relationship, which Harvick spoke of after they won at Atlanta Motor Speedway on June 7 last year. The date also happened to be Childers’ 44th birthday.
“In the end we have a great friendship, we have a great relationship, like to help each other as people, and that goes a long way in the trust factor that is there between Rodney and myself,” Harvick said.
Both crew chief and driver have karting backgrounds and Childers misses that part of his life, saying he’d “mess with go-karts all day, every day” if he could.
As a result, he’s helping Harvick with his son Keelan’s budding karting career. Childers has high praise for Keelan’s talent, and with his own children having interests outside of racing, he’s happy to help along the next generation of racers.
Keelan Harvick has been successful on road courses and recently started racing on dirt at North Carolina’s Millbridge Speedway.
“My first dirt go-kart race was at Millbridge when I was 12 years old, so to take him out there and let him run laps was pretty special for me,” Childers said.
He keeps a watchful eye on the late model world as well, often chiming in on social media and talking consistently with his former driver Scott Riggs (whose son Layne is now an accomplished late model racer), as well as longtime competitors Timothy Peters and Josh Berry.
His voice in the sport is now one of experience and wisdom, despite the fact there is much more he will accomplish.
Being a protégé of Ray Evernham tends to provide an advantage in that regard.
“He did it the right way and expected the right things out of everybody,” Childers said.
Childers is doing it the right way, too.