Stewart- Haas Racing has signed crew chief Rodney Childers to a multiyear contract extension, maintaining the successful pairing with 2014 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion Kevin Harvick. In his inaugural season as crew chief for Harvick and the #4 Budweiser/Jimmy John’s team in 2014, Childers oversaw an outfit that won five races, scored eight poles and led 2,137 laps en route to the championship. The Childers-led squad became only the third Sprint Cup team to lead more than 2,000 laps in a single year since 2000, and of the 24 track qualifying records set during the 2014 season, the #4 Budweiser/Jimmy John’s team accounted for six of them. No other team had more than four. Childers and Harvick haven’t let up in 2015. They have a commanding lead in the championship point standings 13 races into the season thanks to two wins, nine top-two finishes and 12 top-10 finishes. They’ve also led 1,123 laps this season, or 25.99 percent of the laps available. The next closest driver in laps led this season is Harvick’s SHR teammate Kurt Busch, who has led 659 laps in his #41 Haas Automation Chevy SS. Childers is a native North Carolinian who turns 39 on June 7.(Stewart-Haas Racing)(6-5-2015)
UPDATE: The deal will keep Childers paired with reigning NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion Kevin Harvick on the #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.(NASCAR.com)(6-6-2015)
