Ford Performance Notes and Quotes
NASCAR Cup Series
Ford Zoom Media Availability | Tuesday, July 6, 2021
RODNEY CHILDERS, Crew Chief, No. 4 Busch Light Ford Mustang — WHAT HAS THIS SEASON BEEN LIKE AFTER HOW WELL THINGS WENT IN 2020? “You can look at it starting back in the fall last year we started to kind of lose our stride a little bit and the Hendrick cars got going really good there at the end of the year. This year, we’ve just kind of been off a little bit all year long, no matter if it’s been a road course or a 550 race or a 750 race, kind of off all together. It’s definitely been tough. Everybody has been working really hard trying to get better. As you know, too, it’s tough to start reeling all that back in. You head down one direction and you’ve got to try to just keep after it and hopefully keep getting better every week, and we’ve made some gains, but we haven’t just been knocking it out of the park as far as catching up, so we just have to keep working and hopefully get better.”
HOW DISAPPOINTING WOULD IT BE TO HAVE A SO-SO RUN AT A PLACE LIKE ATLANTA THIS WEEKEND AFTER SO MUCH SUCCESS THERE IN THE PAST? “Atlanta is one of those places we’ve been really good at. I think if you took the downforce back off of them and gave the horsepower back, we’d be even better. But, on the other side of that, the 550 stuff, we’ve still been OK. In 2019 we led laps and probably had the best car on the long runs and didn’t capitalize at the end of it. In 2020, we weren’t great at the beginning, kept adjusting on it and got really good at the end. This year at Atlanta I think we just kind of missed it a little bit. We were further off on our cars early in the year than what we thought, and just a lot of little things that I probably don’t need to get into, but, overall, I think our car this weekend should be a little bit better. I’m not gonna say that we can just blow the doors off everybody, but hopefully we can run with them and have a shot.”
WHAT DO YOU DO TO KEEP THE LINES OF COMMUNICATION OPEN BETWEEN YOU AND KEVIN, AND THE CREW WHEN YOU’RE HAVING A SEASON LIKE THIS? “I think the biggest thing for us is I’m honestly really fortunate to have the people that I have. They’re all very detail-oriented. They don’t need to be pushed every day to try to do their jobs better. They do it on their own. Even though we have those meetings and we talk about the race, we talk about the things we could have done better. They don’t necessarily need that, they just try to be the best every single day, so that part has been fairly easy. Yeah, we leave the racetrack we’re disappointed. We complain about certain things driving to and from the airport and all those things that goes along with our sport and racing in general, but, overall, we still come to the shop. We still try to build the best cars we can. We still try to get better every single week and you can look at the pit crew side of things. You look back at 2015, where we had really lights-out cars and couldn’t get off pit road to save our lives and gave away probably 12 wins that year. Then this year, our pit crew has just saved us over and over and over all year long and have been the lights-out part of our team this year. Whether the cars are good or bad, those guys have stayed positive. They’ve worked their butts off and keep trying to be the best every week and the same with the guys here at the shop.”
WILL YOU GET TO A POINT WHERE YOU STOP TRYING TO FIND SPEED IN THE CURRENT CAR TO WORK ON THE NEXT GEN MODEL FOR NEXT YEAR? “I’ve been asked that quite a few times this year. I want to say, yeah, we’ve put a ton into the Next Gen car and that’s the reason that we’re off a little bit, but it’s really not. We’ve just got behind on the current car and we’ve lost people and we’ve lost important people. I think the Next Gen car is a bit scary for people that have been in this sport for a long time. Designers and engineers and a lot of our aero group and different personnel have decided to move on and get out of racing in general and that part hurts. I’m definitely not pointing fingers and saying that’s the reason we’re running bad because we were running bad before they left, so I’m just saying that it makes it harder to catch up. The limited wind tunnel time. The limited CFD time, all those things have hurt us. I think Stewart-Haas Racing in general has always been probably the leader in the garage of using wind tunnel time and that’s one of the reasons we’ve run good over the years, and now that all of that is gone it makes it really tough for us to catch up and to do the things that we need to do. It’s a tough sport and you’ve seen it over the years that when a company or a manufacturer gets ahead it’s hard for the others to catch up, so hopefully we can keep getting better like I said earlier and have some strong runs here in the second half of the year.”
TWO MONTHS AGO YOU SAID YOU WERE DOWN 70 COUNTS OF REAR DOWNFORCE. WHERE ARE YOU IN TERMS OF REGAINING THAT? AND WHAT IS THE STATE OF SHR FROM AN AERODYNAMIC STANDPOINT? “Yeah, it’s crazy how that works. That remark back then was compared to last year when we were the best and everybody in the field lost some downforce. I think some lost 30 counts. Some lost 45 counts and some lost 70 counts and I think the 70 counts was Stewart-Haas, so that part sucks, but, overall, it is what it is. Our goal is to work through that and to try to get better. I wish I could tell you that we have more downforce than the beginning of the year, but we really don’t. We’ve probably lost some since the beginning of the year because every week that you go through tech there’s something else that is going on throughout the garage, and Jay will send out the comms and say, ‘We’re not gonna do this anymore and we’re gonna check this differently and we’re gonna do this.’ Those things just keep adding up, so one week you might find something that adds seven or eight counts of downforce and then the next thing you’re fixing something that loses seven or eight counts of downforce, so compared to the field it’s hard to say where we’re at. You really don’t know that question or that answer, but all we can do is compare to ourselves and we think that we’re going in the right direction. We think that maybe some of the direction that we were going the first half of the year was the wrong direction and now we’re going back the other direction and I felt like we had a lot better cars at Nashville and at Pocono. I thought we had a decent car there and track position was everything, but once we got up there we had a really good car and hopefully we’ll see this weekend what we have at Atlanta.”
ARE YOU STILL BUILDING CARS FOR THIS YEAR GIVEN THAT YOU HAVE A CAR THAT HAS A LIFE CYCLE OF THREE OR FOUR MONTHS LEFT? IF YOU AREN’T BUILDING AS MANY CARS DOES THAT LIMIT YOUR ABILITY TO KEEP IMPROVING THROUGH THE DEVELOPMENT CYCLES? “For us, it’s not necessarily building new cars. The center cage is what it is. Every three races our cars get new front clips and new rear clips. The bodies get cut off completely, so when you’re talking about new cars, then, yeah, you’re still gonna cut bodies off. You’re still gonna start over and go race those cars the second half of the year, so some of that is track dependent. With the 550 package you have so many different types of tracks. The car that you run at Michigan, you wouldn’t run at Charlotte and the car you run at Charlotte you wouldn’t run at Atlanta. So, you kind of have to do that no matter what. You have to cut the bodies off and start over, so we’ll keep doing the things that we’ve always done. Every year we’ve done the same things and prepare ourselves for the playoffs and try to be ready and do the things that we can to do that, so we’ll keep working and trying to get it better.”
HAVE YOU LOST A SIGNIFICANT NUMBER OF AERO PEOPLE? “I think everybody has throughout the sport. Everybody I’ve talked to from different teams and different crew chiefs. I think we’re all losing a lot of people, but on the other side of it they probably see the writing on the wall. If you feel like the Next Gen car is gonna cut a lot of people out of their jobs, then you don’t want to be the last one standing looking for a job. You want to be the first guy out there finding something, and the rest of it is just the designers want to design stuff and the Next Gen car you can’t design stuff. You can’t change anything and if you spent half your life going to school to be a designer, you want to use it, so some of it is just that. It’s not that they don’t want to work for Stewart-Haas Racing anymore, they want to design things and use their brains on aero stuff, whether it’s building airplanes or what it is. That’s just part of it, I think. I don’t think it’s necessarily just us. I think it’s all throughout the sport.”
HOW HAS THE TEAM MEETING DYNAMIC BEEN WITH A COUPLE OF YOUNGER DRIVERS AND A COUPLE OF VETERANS TRYING TO FIGURE THINGS OUT? “I think you go through different things throughout your career and like somebody said earlier I’ve been around long enough to see this over and over. From 2006-2007 at Evernham you can replay this exact situation. We went through three-quarters of the year in ‘07 and Ray got us in a room and told us we could build the cars however we wanted, instead of listening to how the aero group wanted to build them and we had run 25th the whole year and we went the next race after we built a new car and we ran fourth, so those things have happened for years and years and years, and the thing that you kind of got to keep — I don’t even know how to say it — but you don’t want to stir the pot too much. You’ve got to keep everybody pulling on the same rope and working in the same direction, so you can’t just come in one day and piss everybody off and think that you’re gonna fix everything because that’s not gonna fix it either. It’s careful steps of small changes every week and trying to head back in the direction that you feel is right and hopefully those results kind of speak for themselves and just move forward from that.”
IN RECENT YEARS YOU HAVE BANKED A LOT OF PLAYOFF POINTS AND DIDN’T NECESSARILY CARE ABOUT WINNING A STAGE. HOW WILL YOUR SITUATION THIS YEAR AFFECT YOUR PIT STRATEGY? “I think when the playoffs start it’s definitely gonna be different racing for us. I told Kevin this before we started the race at Kansas, the morning of the race. He said, ‘What do you think today is gonna go like?’ And I said, ‘Well, you’re gonna have to race differently than you’ve ever raced. You’re gonna have to race like Kyle Busch did last year and you’re gonna have to fight for every position all day long and hopefully you’re in the top five somewhere at the end of the day to where you can capitalize on something.’ And he went out there that day and he fought and clawed all day long and at the end of the day Kyle wins the race and we finish second, and that’s really what it’s about. Like, neither one of us had the fastest cars at Kansas, but we sit there and did the right things. We had good pit stops. We had all that going for us, so it’s the same thing when the playoffs start this year. Yeah, we’re probably gonna have to get stage points and that kind of thing, but I think the thing to look at too is not a lot of races left in the playoffs are races where you’re gonna pit early and do all those things. You’ve got the Roval in there, but, overall, it’s gonna be about having fast cars and having the best engines and doing all those things, and being fast. If you can’t go out there and lead laps and win stages and be in that top five in every stage and get those points, then you don’t hardly deserve to move on any way. For us, we want to win. We want to go out there and compete and get back to where we used to be.”
ARE THERE AREAS WHERE YOU CAN FIND THINGS TO GET BETTER OR IS IT A CASE OF YOU HAVE WHAT YOU HAVE AND TRY TO MAKE THE BEST OF IT? “My honest answer is it kind of is what it is at this point. You don’t have many races left before the playoffs. We’ll probably go to the wind tunnel two more times before the playoffs start, maybe three times,. so from a car side we’re not really gonna make the cars much better than where they’re at this weekend at Atlanta. From an engine side, those guys have been locked up all year long. They had to submit all of their parts going into this year and they can’t change all the things that we’ve been able to change in years past to be able to find more horsepower either, so when you can’t find more horsepower and you can’t find more downforce, it puts you in a tight box. Those are the things that I think all of us are sitting here thinking and talking about is you’re just gonna have to race differently and not make mistakes and be good on pit road and do those things and hopefully you can make it through the next round, but it’s gonna be tough.”
ATLANTA ANNOUNCED THEY’RE GOING TO REPAVE AFTER THE WEEKEND AND CHANGE THE BANKING IN THE TURNS TO 28 DEGREES AND NARROW THE TRACK A LITTLE BIT. ANY IDEA WHAT THAT WILL DO TO THE RACING AND WHAT ARE YOUR GENERAL THOUGHTS? “My opinion is it’s gonna make the racing horrible and it’s gonna be one lane and nobody is gonna pass anybody. That part sucks, but Atlanta is one of the last racetracks that we have with a surface like that, that you can run up against the fence or you can run on the bottom, you can run through the middle of one and two. You have so many options. Even though it was a racetrack that had so many options and what old school racers would call good racing, a lot of people thought that those races down there became boring because the runs are really long. They get spread out. The cars that are good on long runs just drive away from the field and all those things, so, yeah, new pavement, the Next Gen car with having less downforce, I mean you’re gonna run wide-open all the way around. It’s gonna be like racing at Talladega and you’ll be drafting a lot and kind of become a speedway race in a way. The cars will stay tightly packed together, probably more wrecks and all those things that it seems everybody wants to see these days, so that’s kind of the way I see it. If you put more banking in it and make it narrower, it’s gonna be one lane. That’s kind of how the new asphalt tracks are anyway.”
NASCAR IS DOING A FRICTION TEST THIS WEEK IN THE HOPES GOODYEAR CAN MATCH A TIRE FOR IT. HOW MUCH OF IT WILL DEPEND ON TIRE AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEXT GEN CAR? “That’s a tough one, honestly. I think the car is gonna be so much different. I don’t know how you could even use any of that. A friction test now versus then is not really gonna matter at all. Now, you can’t make new asphalt like old asphalt. They don’t even make it that way anymore, so you can’t buy it that way. You can’t make it that way. There are things that they won’t allow. The EPA won’t allow you to put in it that way anymore, so there’s no real comparison at all. You really just have to pave it and let it weather over the years, and then the next part of it is just gonna be that car. We have to as a group figure out how does that car race? How do we put on the best show for the fans, which is our goal? And what changes need to be made over the next couple of years to make that racing better. All of that we’re gonna have to learn together and figure out, so we’ll just have to see how the racetrack turns out and kind of go from there.”
WHAT KIND OF TIRE FALL OFF DO YOU SEE AT A TRACK LIKE CHARLOTTE COMPARED TO ATLANTA? “I think Charlotte is a little bit disguised. We keep spraying stuff on it and running the tire dragon around there, so when you think about that, you think about a drag strip. Does a drag strip really weather over the years? The only places where it weathers are the places where it’s not treated, where the sun can actually beat up on it. Now, we’ve gone on five years of spraying Charlotte and keeping it covered with a big layer of rubber basically. It’s like an insulator. It keeps it from weathering throughout the years. I think I heard Dale Jr. say that on one of the things he was talking about in the NBC car. Texas is the same way now. You pull into Texas and the track is white, except for where we’ve been putting that stuff and if we would have never put that stuff there to begin with, the track would be moving up the racetrack by now. You would have that second and third groove and you would start out the weekend on the bottom. The bottom would get rubbered up and then you would start finding clean racetrack because clean racetrack has more grip. Well, now that we’ve been doing these racetracks like this, it has made everything completely the opposite and your tracks aren’t weathering in the same way that we’ve seen them over all the years. It’s just not gonna happen, so it’s kind of put us in a tough spot. Like, it may have fixed something for a couple years, but now it’s not gonna fix something in years to come, so I think we have to figure out how to fix that and make that better and when these tracks get old and we’ve got to quit putting stuff on them basically and let people find the gray. Those are the things you’ve heard over the years is a guy keeps hunting the gray. Well, the gray is where there is no rubber down and you have that clean racetrack. You think about Fontana over the years when we used to fight to be the first one on the racetrack because whoever was fastest in practice got to go out last qualifying, so we would unload off the hauler at Fontana and run a second faster than what we’d qualify, and that was just because it was a clean racetrack, it had a lot of surface to it I guess you could say, a lot of texture to it, and then during the weekend that texture gets filled up with rubber and as that happens you lose grip, so we have to figure out how to make all that happen again, basically. As a sport, we have to figure out how to make sure that these racetracks do that. Charlotte hasn’t changed a lot, but you look at Darlington, which was paved about the same time that Charlotte was and, man, it’s wore out again and puts on good racing and wears the tires out, so I think all of us as a sport we have to figure out what were the two differences between the paving jobs and who did them and how can we duplicate that.”
YOU AND PAUL MIGHT BE THE ONLY CREW CHIEFS WITH RACING EXPERIENCE AT THE CUP LEVEL. AS YOU SEE THE SPORT CHANGE DO YOU SEE THE INDUSTRY GOING AWAY FROM FORMER DRIVERS TO BE CREW CHIEFS AND FOCUSING MORE ON ENGINEERING BECAUSE SO MUCH IS CHANGING IN THE SPORT RIGHT NOW? “Well, honestly, I think that’s half the problem with the sport right now. That’s what got us in the position that we’re in is we all went that direction seven, eight years ago and have got us into this spot to where it’s all engineer-driven at this point. We tech the cars down to 10/1000ths of an inch at this point and it’s hard to race like that. It’s hard for people. That’s kind of why you’ll end up seeing one team and one manufacturer win so many races, whether that was us last year or HMS this year. It’s kind of the box that we’re all in at this point, so I don’t know. I think you still got to have the old school racer mentality somewhere within your team, whether it’s a guy in the shop that makes sure that things stay running. We have Old Man here (Tony Gibson) and he don’t miss a whole lot and has a ton of knowledge and experience, but it’s hard to say what the new cars are gonna be like. You have a 50-minute practice and the cars are gonna be hard to work on, or you’re not gonna have any practice at all and you’re just gonna qualify and you have to make adjustments during qualifying to get ready to race. All those things you’re not gonna have time to go sit in the hauler and run simulations for 10 minutes and figure out what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna have to change springs. You’re gonna have to work on your bars and do all those things to figure it out in a hurry, so I don’t know. I think I could see it both ways. I mean, it works for some places and it doesn’t for others, and I still think that there’s a fine mixture of both. If I had a four-car team of my own, I think I would have two engineers as crew chiefs and two racers as crew chiefs and I think that would keep the ship steered in the right direction the most and not have to fight back and forth on what’s right and what’s wrong.”
THE ENGINEER AT THE TRACK THE LAST FEW WEEKS HAS BEEN LISTED AS STEVEN AS OPPOSED TO DAX. WHAT LED TO THE CHANGE? “I own a place down at Durhamtown Off Road Park in Georgia and Dax went with me to ride dirt bikes and he decided to do something dumb and broke five ribs, collapsed his lung, had a bleeding spleen and spent 11 days in the hospital, so Steve decided to take his place for a little while until Dax can actually think up anything at all. He’s doing better, though. He’s been working from the shop. As you know, Dax has been around me for a long time and been good friends, so I hate that happened to him, but the old saying if you’re gonna be dumb, you’ve got to be tough and he’s getting better. He’ll be back at Atlanta this weekend.”
