Crew chief will continue successful pairing with Kevin Harvick
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LONG POND, Pa. — Rodney Childers will turn 39 years old Sunday, but he received an early gift this week with a multiyear contract extension with Stewart-Haas Racing.
The deal will keep Childers paired with reigning NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion Kevin Harvick on the No. 4 Chevrolet team for the indefinite future. Stewart-Haas didn’t disclose the terms of the contract in announcing the deal Friday; asked how long the extension will keep him in the SHR fold, Childers simply smiled and said: “It’s a long time.”
“I said this last year, but Kevin’s the last guy I’m ever going to crew chief for, so signing something for a long time doesn’t scare me,” Childers said Friday morning in the Pocono Raceway garage. “I think there’s always going to come a time in somebody’s life when they decide not to crew chief, and I feel like Stewart-Haas would do whatever they wanted to do if I got to that point to help me move into a different role or something like that.
“To be there and have that security and all that stuff is a good feeling for sure.”
Childers said he had another extension in place on his current contract that would have kept him with Stewart-Haas Racing through the end of 2016, but said that the two sides agreed to start from scratch on a new deal. He said he and the team negotiated for “a couple of weeks” on the all-new contract and that talks went smoothly.
Childers moved over from Michael Waltrip Racing to join SHR as Harvick’s crew chief ahead of the 2014 season, a pairing that quickly gained traction and propelled the No. 4 team to the first Sprint Cup championship for both driver and crew chief. That momentum has continued this season with two victories, an impressive 9-for-13 clip in top-five finishes, and a hefty 44-point lead in the standings heading into Sunday’s Axalta “We Paint Winners” 400 (1 p.m. ET, FOX Sports 1, MRN, SiriusXM) at Pocono.
With Childers poised to join Harvick among the ranks of 39-year-olds in a matter of days, plus the crew chief’s proclamation that he’ll end his career with Harvick, the question of when that time might come is a natural one.
“It’s hard to say. Everybody kind of has a cycle, but we’ve definitely got something together that I think works and we’re both comfortable with each other,” Childers said. “We have fun and we’ve got a great race team behind us. To ever want something different, I don’t know what you would ever do. After the last year and a half, what are you ever going to do that would make you feel the way you do right now? There’s really nothing. Anything from here is going to be downhill, so we’ve just got to try to keep doing what we’re doing.”
Best crew chief in the garage all signed up!!! Great news! #welldeserved https://t.co/lEAyWDVLSN
— Kevin Harvick (@KevinHarvick) June 5, 2015