Editor’s Note: This marks the second story in a three-part series as Spire Motorsports allows NASCAR Digital Media to cover its preparation for the 2025 Daytona 500.
MOORESVILLE, N.C. — Rodney Childers walks the shop floor at Spire Motorsports feeling invigorated. There’s a rekindled spark in his eye.
The hallways he strolls today are starkly different than those he patrolled 12 weeks ago at Stewart-Haas Racing. When he walked into SHR in the fall of 2013, the organization had already won 20 NASCAR Cup Series races, among them a Brickyard 400 and a Cup championship.
Pacing the pristine white floors of Spire, Childers joins a team that has just one Cup victory to its name, courtesy of Justin Haley in 2019. And yet, to Childers, the echoes of those SHR memories aren’t quite so distant. There’s a striking familiarity, in fact, that he could be building his next title contender in Mooresville, some 18 miles north of the Kannapolis shop in which he forged himself into a Hall-of-Fame-caliber crew chief. He joins Haley and the No. 7 Chevrolet team at Spire for the 2025 Cup campaign.
“It feels more like SHR in the beginning, honestly, not the end — which is a good thing,” Childers said Wednesday.
Coming from the guy who led Harvick to a Cup Series championship in their first year together at SHR, perhaps the series should enter on high alert.
RELATED: Read Part 1 of Spire’s Daytona prep
A CLEAN SLATE
At his previous place of employment, Rodney Childers built a championship-winning team from the ground up as a crew chief. With a legendary driver behind the wheel in Kevin Harvick, Childers established himself as Hall-worthy with an astounding 37 wins at Stewart-Haas Racing over a record-setting decade in the NASCAR Cup Series.
Those were the good days — the great days — that became the standard for his way of operating. Today, Childers stands before the 2025 season winless across the past two seasons, dating back to Harvick’s final celebration in August 2022. An internal downturn and eventual closing of the doors at Stewart-Haas Racing dimmed both the success and the fun from Childers’ run in the sun until the doors shut in November.
MORE: Look inside Spire’s shop as cars come to life
That’s where the people at Spire have made their impact already. Childers is surrounded by a group of racers with optimism and experience, all looking forward at what opportunities lie ahead as part of what could be a bright future.
“You can stand here on a 7 o’clock meeting in the mornings and you look around the room, and it’s all A-plus people,” Childers said. “There’s not C people standing around, and that’s really hard to come across right now. It’s hard to find good help. It’s hard to find good engineers and good mechanics in every single position. And here, I haven’t come across anybody that’s not an A-plus guy or A-plus woman.”
Sitting on a grand stage centered along the wall in Spire Motorsports’ lobby as the team hosts a well-attended media day event, Childers estimates 18 people from Stewart-Haas made the pilgrimage to Spire for the 2025 season. Of those 18, one of the most important was Robert “Cheddar” Smith, who follows Childers as his car chief after 11 years serving the same role on the SHR No. 4 car. Former lead engineer Dax Gerringer now serves as Spire’s technical director. But the new journey isn’t about Spire becoming SHR Lite — though with just one win to its name, Spire would love to chip into SHR’s 70-win total. It’s about utilizing everyone’s strength at an organization that took tangible steps forward in 2024.
“How do we become better teammates with each other? How do we work together better?” Childers said. “There’s just so many sides of it. And right now, we’re extremely fortunate for what we have. I can’t wait to go racing.”
NOT-SO-SECRET WEAPON
Championship experience is not something deeply engrained in Spire Motorsports’ pre-existing fiber. That is no slight on a still-blooming organization and instead the reality of the runway that remains ahead of it.
Childers, on the other hand, carries that pedigree with him wherever he goes. His expectation to win is part of what separates him from those who merely want to.
The level of preparation that comes with that is new for Haley, who returns to the No. 7 Chevrolet in 2025 after a reacquainting appetizer of seven races in 2024.
“I’ve quickly realized what Cup racing is through Rodney and Cheddar, and nothing is ever good enough for them,” Haley said Wednesday. “And that’s been refreshing to me, that there’s nothing overlooked, no stone unturned. If you need something done, it is done five minutes ago. It’s truly been incredible to go through the process of the offseason with the two of them, and then Matt McCall, Ryan Sparks, and obviously (Michael) McDowell and Travis (Peterson) as well.
“I guess I didn’t quite understand what level they were racing on. I feel like I was living on a different planet, honestly. And that’s nothing against where I’ve been. It’s just to compete at a high level and win races like Rodney, Cheddar, all those people have done, it requires something else.”
For example, Haley’s seat position in prior Cup cars was set in such a way that his core and spine were negatively impacted, leaving his tailbone incredibly uncomfortable after races. Childers prioritized recalibrating that position so that Haley sits as comfortably as possible moving forward and can simply focus on driving.
What comes with someone with Childers’ caliber is the desire of others to be a part of what he builds. Mechanics, engineers and other crewmen know the expectation that pairs with working for Childers. They want to be part of that journey.
“It’s the people that Rodney brought with him too and the people that were already here that have been here since the inception of Spire Motorsports that have lived every moment of it,” Haley told NASCAR.com. “So yeah, Rodney obviously is a huge plus to us — having him and having that confidence, knowing that he’s going to take care of it. I think that’s what’s given me a lot of confidence, too, is there’s nothing that I can ask that’s too much for them that they aren’t going to take care of. It’s just been refreshing it’s honestly. Just been a whole change of lifestyle.”
Jeff Dickerson, co-owner of Spire, has seen that injection of life from Childers, McCall, McDowell and Peterson firsthand — but in a way that has been complementary rather than earth-shattering.
“I think it’s been more additive,” Dickerson said. “What I really appreciate about those guys is that when they got here, they didn’t look at us as a problem that needed to be solved. They weren’t coming in being like, ‘Look at these idiots. We gotta fix this and fix that.’ They’ve really just come in with an additive kind of tone where it’s like, ‘Hey, you guys are already have done this. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel here. How do I just take you to another step?’
“Certainly, when somebody like Rodney Childers talks, he has the legitimacy of all those wins and championships that you listen, right? So I mean, he carries a lot of weight.”
SEEKING DAYTONA GLORY
Childers has accomplished plenty in his career — two Brickyard 400 victories at Indianapolis, two Southern 500s at Darlington, the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte among them.
Notably absent from that list of crown jewels, though, is the Daytona 500.
“It just kind of hangs over my head every year,” Childers told NASCAR.com.
Many of the sport’s greats never get to experience Daytona’s most glorious victory. Mark Martin’s decades of unsatisfied journeys remain prominent in Childers’ mind, as does Dale Earnhardt’s 20-year wait.
“We’ve always been in contention,” Childers said. “We’ve been leading on the last maybe two laps or last lap. I mean, counting all the speedways, it’s 10 times we’ve been leading on the last lap. And then it just doesn’t work out.”
There is a budding optimism for Daytona that runs parallel to his season-long hopes. Childers felt the No. 4 car he prepared for Josh Berry in the August 2024 Daytona race was the best vehicle in show until it crashed from the lead late. This year, he also brings on lead engineer Jonathan Branzelle, who previously served as McCall’s engineer on the No. 6 RFK Racing entry with Brad Keselowski — another superspeedway powerhouse.
“I think we have a lot going for us,” Childers said. “In reality, I think Justin might be the best speedway racer we’ve ever went to a speedway race with. So I think that’ll be key for all of us to go down there and perform well.”
On Jan. 29, just two weeks before cars will unload at Daytona for a 10 a.m. ET practice session, the shell of the No. 7 Chevrolet that Haley will pilot sits unwrapped on jack stands. This is an improvement, however, from the last check-in, when Daytona cars were yet to be clipped together. The chassis are built, body panels installed, but no engines yet in place.
Still, there remains no anxiety of running behind schedule. All is on track for the three-car operation, and Childers has no worries.
“To be honest, I felt like at Stewart-Haas, we pushed that too far out all the time,” Childers said. “They wanted to start building the Daytona cars two months before and then they would just sit around. It was different over there too because we had like a speedway guy that, kind of like (Jimmy) Fennig does at Roush is like, you know, if you had somebody to sit there and just baby them to death, then yeah, maybe start building them earlier. But right now, we don’t really have that person.
“But, yeah, they’re in good shape. I feel like they’re coming together well. They look nice, down to just the detail stuff. If you were to open the hood on one of them six months ago compared to now, it looks way nicer. So everybody’s doing a really good job with all of it and feel good about it.”
What’s next is performing immediately when the car rolls onto the race track.
“Going to the Daytona 500 is really what matters,” Childers said. “We want to go down there and qualify well. We want to race well in the duels and then have a shot at it in the 500.”
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