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MONSTER ENERGY NASCAR CUP SERIES: CONSUMERS ENERGY 400

July 12, 2018

Rodney Childers

Brooklyn, Michigan

THE MODERATOR: We are joined by the crew chief of the race winning team, which was the No.4 Busch Light Mobile1 Ford. We have Rodney Childers up here with us.

Q. How vital was it for you guys and also JGR, who were amongst the first to get the OSS, to be able to get that in house, be able to play with it, experiment with it?
RODNEY CHILDERS: I don't know, really, without knowing the details of every single race team and how they work. I'm not sure who got what when and what their development process was. All we can worry about is what we do. We treat every year the same, and you have to come out of the box strong, and I felt like every year we've been able to do that in the first five races except for maybe a little bit last year.
Overall, I think it is very important for sure and definitely something that maybe helped the teams that had it, and I don't see how you can race without it, to be honest with you. There's still maybe a couple teams that don't have one, the big teams, I guess, and I really don't see how you can race without it.

Q. Are you surprised that some big teams didn't start to get it until now?
RODNEY CHILDERS: Yeah, I think so. I think everybody was kind of wondering how it would all go. You just have to‑‑ you have to go along with it. I think some people questioned whether it was going to work or not, and our group felt like NASCAR had done a really good job with it and had shown a lot of progress, and definitely when they started bringing it at the end of the year last year, it worked really good.
Our group was very involved in that during the fall last year and trying to understand it, and that's the key is you have to accept change and you have to keep moving forward.

Q. If I've got it right, the last pit stop of Kevin was lap 171, and then he dropped back to position 20 and he came back to the front. Were you concerned that maybe some unknown factors could happen and he couldn't make it back to the front?
RODNEY CHILDERS: No, I mean, all those other guys couldn't make it on fuel from there, so they were going to have to pit. The key was coming out of the pits and getting by the three cars as fast as you can so you're back on the lead lap, and then if the caution came out everybody in front of you is going to pit and you're the leader again. That wasn't really any concern at all.

Q. And the second question, maybe I'm wrong, but I had the impression that the car was even faster than in the first two stages. In case you make any changes to the car at the last pit stop, can you give some details what kind of things you changed?
RODNEY CHILDERS: Yeah, before the last pit stop we were a little bit too tight, and these cars are so sensitive these days, and we put a quarter of a round in the right rear and it was way too loose there at the end. Sometimes you just don't know if you should mess with it or not. But that's just part of it. I think a lot of racetracks we're always a little bit freer pitting under green than we are pitting under caution. We went a little bit too far there and definitely got too loose at the end.

Q. Is it right that this car hasn't run since Michigan in June?
RODNEY CHILDERS: Yeah, this car, I think it ran at Fontana first, and then we ended up wadding it up a little too early in the race, but it was fast there, and we brought it to Michigan and it was fast, and then we rebuilt it and brought it back again.

Q. Why not run it again, and was it a thing where you felt like, gosh, it should have won this race in June, so did you just focus and say, hey, this is a great chance to win, we're not going to screw it up?
RODNEY CHILDERS: I think a lot of people do their stuff differently. I set my schedule up in my cars in January, and then I know where they're going, and there's this much amount of time between them, and this is what we're going to do to them between each race. Trying to run the same car over and over again without making it better, you're not going to win races.
I almost shed a tear the other day, we got back from Pocono after having a car that was completely dominant, and I walked by the tear‑down area and it was nothing but a chassis with no body on it. That's part of this sport. That's what we do. We try to make our cars better, and you can't sit on your hands.

Q. Do you schedule based on how‑‑
RODNEY CHILDERS: No, I feel like they've all been good. It's all about making the best out of them. They're pieces of metal, and what you do to them is what makes them go fast. You know, sometimes you may want to go over there and pet one and be nice to it and hope that it'll be nice to you, but it's really about just executing at the shop and at the racetrack and doing things right, and I feel like that's what we've done the best job at.

Q. I was just wondering, looking ahead to next year with the Ford Mustang coming in to take over for the Fusion cars, do you feel like Ford will be able to avoid the body issues that Chevrolet has had so far this season with the new Camaro nose that they're using?
RODNEY CHILDERS: You know, nothing is ever guaranteed. There's so many‑‑ I think you guys have heard me talk about last year. Yeah, we switched to Ford. It was a big change, and you can say this or that, that's why we weren't as strong last year, but it really is about details. I mean, it's about every single little thing. My honest opinion is yes, it'll take time to figure out all those details. When do we need to start? 10 months ago. And hopefully‑‑ we've had that so separate that we haven't‑‑ you don't want that to involve with this year, so hopefully when it comes that time, then when the car is handed over to us, it'll be ready to go, and then over the winter we've just got to work really hard. We've got to work day and night to figure out the details of it and the aero side of it, and a lot of it will come down to what kind of races we have next year, whether it's this package or this package. If it comes down to putting the big aero ducts in and the plates back on it, one car might be good and one car might be bad, and I think as a sport, we'll see which one ends up better at that.
Right now, none of us know. It will take a few races to figure out where we're at.

Q. Austin Dillon drove all the way up to second and probably would have finished there if not for running over something. He had a new chassis. How much do you think other teams were showing their hand today knowing that this might be a good indicator of Vegas and some other tracks in the playoffs?
RODNEY CHILDERS: Yeah, I had heard a lot of different things this morning, and rumors are rumors, and I heard a lot of people had new cars here and getting ready for the Chase. You know, it's hard to say. I felt like we've just kind of been a steady movement. We haven't just thrown chassis away and built new ones. We're just trying to make things a little bit better at a time each week. It was incredible to see those guys run good. Even Friday after qualifying, I was happy as I could be for them because those guys have worked really hard, and I think the 3 and the 31 both had good speed. They had good motors. I said that early in the race watching our roof camera, that the 31 would run down the straightaway. It's cool to see the hard work pay off that those guys have done and hopefully they keep getting better.

Q. I think there was one flaw you guys had today, one pit stop where you lost a few spots. Is that the one area you need to shore up for the playoffs?
RODNEY CHILDERS: Yeah, somebody was asking me this morning that same question, what do you need to work on. We've moved some things around, and those guys have done a good job lately. It's not perfect, but I think it only shows up a little bit more on our car. It really does. But if you look at those reports we get every week, even Pocono, the 18 looked good because he had the fastest stop the last stop of the race and just killed everybody off pit road. But if you look at the rest of the day, they really weren't very good. Sometimes we have ours at the wrong moment and it makes it look bad, but they have worked their tails off, and hopefully we can keep getting better and better, and it's really about confidence. It's not about the players that jump over the wall. It's about having the confidence that something is not going to go wrong; lug nuts aren't going to fall on the ground and you're not going to drop the gun. It's just all that stuff, and it's the same whether you're a crew chief, whether you're a driver or whether you're a pit crew member, you have to have that confidence every single week. That's the biggest thing we're working on. It showed after the first one that they were able to put it away and do a good job the rest of the day, so hopefully we can keep that up.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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