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NASCAR CUP SERIES: DRYDENE 311August 23, 2020Rodney ChildersDover, Delaware THE MODERATOR: We are now joined by the crew chief of the race‑winning and regular season championship winning team, Rodney Childers, with the No.4 Mobil 1 Ford. Q. With as many bonus points as you guys accumulated, is it going to be disappointing if you guys don't get to Phoenix to race for the championship? RODNEY CHILDERS: Yeah, I mean, that's definitely something that has crossed my mind. You know, when you have teams like the 4 and the 11 that have won a lot of races and stacked up a lot of points and done all the right things all year, you kind of want to see those guys fight for a championship, whether it was the 4 car or if it was somebody else. If it was somebody else, I would want to see them have a shot at a championship. You know, that part is what it is. It's our jobs to go out there and perform every week and to do the right things and to stay out of trouble, just all the stuff that we've done all year, and that's kind of up to us. Yeah, we want to make it there and we want to have a shot, but overall we've just got to focus on each round and surviving. I think you've heard us talk about that as a team a lot over the six years of just getting through every round and making it to that last race and having a shot. We've got fortunate enough to win one of them, and we've lost a few, so overall hopefully we can get there and just give it our best effort and have a shot at it. Q. You guys have come close to that second championship and have fallen short. What does that mean to get a second title and what have you learned from falling short that you can apply to this year's title run? RODNEY CHILDERS: You know, I think a championship is something that we all strive for. We've been fortunate enough to win a lot of races, but that championship is what everybody talks about. When everybody talks about Kevin Harvick going into the Hall of Fame, they're going to talk about how many wins he has, how many champions he has, how many poles he has, but the championship part is what's going to stand out the most. And the same for me as a crew chief; those are the things that you want to accomplish, championships, Daytona 500s, all those things. It just means a lot to our whole team. We've got a great team behind us, and they work their butts off. They strive for perfection and building great race cars and going out there and winning races. To win a championship just puts icing on the cake for everybody. Q. You guys seemed to roll off strong off the truck and that's helped here with no practice and no qualifying during the post‑COVID‑19 break races. How has the SMT data played into how you guys have set up the car? RODNEY CHILDERS: I don't know. I mean, we definitely go back and look at that stuff from past races and you can kind of watch different things. But overall we kind of go off of notes more of what we did the last time we were at that particular track and what kind of aero changes we've had since then, what kind of tire changes we've had since then. Our engineering group on the 4 car is the strongest it's ever been. They work great together. They focus on all the right things. Our lead engineer, Dax, from our days all the way back at Waltrip in 2009 and 2010, he's always been the type that can hit it off the track. You look at the races we've won with David Reutimann and the poles and stuff with Mark Martin and all that stuff, he's always been the engineer in the garage that can hit it close. We've got two other engineers that work with him now, and both of those guys are just as much as perfectionists as Dax is. It's cool to win today. Today is Dax's birthday. It's cool to be sitting here talking about him and also winning on his birthday. Q. We heard last week some crew chiefs talking about the challenges of Dover and how rough it is on equipment. In between the two races was there much that you had to change on the car due to the rough nature of the race at Dover, and is that something that you'll take forward? RODNEY CHILDERS: Yeah, this place is definitely rough on parts. It's rough on chassis and suspensions and everything else, hubs, brakes. We talked about‑‑ I think everybody kind of saw that we had an issue with our track bar falling yesterday, so we had to worry about that. We had to put hubs on the car, brakes on the car. We saw that we almost ran out of brake pad yesterday, so we had to put some different calipers on with shorter pistons in them to put some thicker pads in there. We took our truck arm out and looked for cracks on it and put it all back together. At one point it was every hub off and everything out of it and put it all back together. Way more work than Michigan. We won the race and we wiped it off and rolled it out there the next day and raced it again, but Dover is a completely different animal for sure. THE MODERATOR: Rodney, thanks for joining us, and congratulations on the win and the regular season championship, and good luck next week. RODNEY CHILDERS: Thank you, guys. I appreciate it. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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