Rodney Childers hardly goes down into the basement of his North Carolina home.
The basement is where you’ll instead find his teenage twin sons, Gavin and Brody, watching television or other activities. Earlier this month, though, when Childers started going through memorabilia in his Stewart-Haas Racing office, he needed to go down there.
“I started cleaning my office out, which sucked, and when you’ve been there for 11 years and everything we’ve done as a team, that was emotional,” Childers said. “Then you’re loading the truck up and I got home, and I had the whole family carrying trophies and things down to the basement. It was like, ‘Where are we going to put this?’ When they all walked back upstairs, I started looking around and I was like, ‘This is pretty incredible.'”
Childers had to clean out his office because Stewart-Haas Racing will shut its doors in little more than a week. The 2024 NASCAR season finale at Phoenix Raceway will be the team’s last race.
Now his basement is filled with trophies, die-cast cars, champagne bottles, firesuits and more from Cup Series races he has won as crew chief of the No. 4 car with Kevin Harvick.
“I wish I had paid the extra money to get every trophy,” Childers said. “Kevin was buying me trophies every time we won a race. Well, in 2018, we started winning so much they cut me off. Kevin got to $92,000 on trophies. Then it happened again in 2020.
“I wish I had gotten them all because 20 or 30 years from now, that’s all you’ve got is to sit around and tell stories and look at trophies. So, I wish I had them all, but it’s still a lot. We’re out of room.”
Childers and Harvick will go down as the most successful pairing in Stewart-Haas Racing’s history. They won the 2014 series championship — in their first year working together — and 37 races by the time Harvick retired in 2023.
Harvick wants Stewart-Haas to be remembered for its culture and what co-owner and three-time Cup Series champion Tony Stewart brought there. The race shop had a blue-collar, racer’s attitude, and if there was work to be done and ways to be faster, there were people who could make it happen.
“I was fortunate to be given the keys of, ‘Hey, we want you to come in here and help us figure out how to make this team run fast,'” Harvick said to ESPN. “I had a lot more input than I would have at a lot of other places because of the relationship I had with Tony, and I believed in that culture they had. That’s what drew all the people who loved racing to come work there.”
What stands out for Harvick is that those at Stewart-Haas thrived on pulling off what others thought couldn’t be done. Just look at the driver lineup through the years and the variety of personalities in one building. With the likes of Stewart, Harvick, Kurt Busch, Clint Bowyer and Danica Patrick, there were as many highlights as there was attitude.
“It was about doing the best we could with who and what we had and pairing up whatever driver with a [crew chief] that would either tolerate or challenge that person,” Greg Zipadelli, the competition director at Stewart-Haas, told ESPN. “Even the drivers at times didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but they went out and respected each other for their talent levels.”
Zipadelli has been at Stewart-Haas from the beginning. Not only has he seen it all, but he also played a part in making it work. Throughout the years, the organization grew from two Cup Series entries to four, and then came the Xfinity Series program that went from one car to two.
Stewart-Haas Racing has a total of 105 victories: 70 in the Cup Series and 28 in the Xfinity Series. There is also a lone ARCA Menards Series West win. Among the victories are triumphs in the four crown jewel events: the Daytona 500, Coca-Cola 600, Brickyard 400 and Southern 500.
There are also six nonpoint event wins in the Cup Series along with 87 poles between the Cup, Xfinity and ARCA. Stewart, Harvick and Cole Custer have won driver championships for Stewart-Haas.
“Honestly, it’s hard and depressing because over the years I feel everyone has done a good job,” Zipadelli said. “You look at the wins and championships for the amount of time we’ve been in business, I think it’s been a solid accomplishment. It’s definitely disappointing to see it all breaking up.”
Childers would like Stewart-Haas to be remembered by those in the garage for the innovation that came from the organization. He hopes there is an appreciation for the pure talent and genius that came from trying to find new ways to succeed.
In the dominant years Childers and Harvick had, the garage never caught up to what they were doing. It was simply impossible because Childers fondly recalls how the competition never knew what Stewart-Haas was doing or when it was doing it.
“We would just keep changing,” Childers said. “There was so much ingenuity, whether it was in the bodies or when we were building our own chassis.
“All those races we won in 2018 and 2020, we had what we called a front-mount-shock car where the bump-stop load was going through the front, and the brakes were on the back. What it was doing was raising the splitter up a half inch in the corner and it would lower the whole rest of the cage in the roof a half inch. Nobody else could figure it out.
“It was hard workers. It was ingenuity. It was just racers. That’s really what it was about. And having some hard-nosed drivers, too.”
The end for Stewart-Haas comes with a whimper instead of a bang. Chase Briscoe won at Darlington Raceway in early September, the team’s first victory since 2022 and what could be its last. The performance across the board for its teams has not been to the standards of what was once routine.
And as it happens in racing, there were drivers who came and went. Harvick’s retirement left a hole in the team. Stewart is happily focused on his family and NHRA drag racing. The company has lost sponsorship funding with the exit of multiple partners throughout the years.
“I thought it was really cool to see a guy come in and stick his neck out in certain areas, whether it be financially or just from a sheer time standpoint and being spread thin,” Chase Elliott said to ESPN of Stewart. “I always thought it was really cool that he went out and did that and had success with it and made it work. You hate to see them go just because the overall health of our sport wants and needs healthy race teams, and they’ve been a healthy race team. I hate to see that.
“But they’ve had a solid legacy. Anytime you have something end like that, it’s really easy to forget all the good that went on and just look at what’s happened in the past year or whatever. But I still admire their efforts to go and be what they’ve become and be a top-tier team in NASCAR. That’s a hard thing to do, and they did that.”
Briscoe doesn’t want the lasting image of Stewart-Haas to be how it’s ending. The first thing he hopes is remembered is how many races the organization won.
“It’s crazy to think that a place as successful as it was, in such a short window could be in the position now where it’s closing down,” Briscoe told ESPN. “It should be remembered as this place that was really, really dominant in its time, and it’s sad to see it go. It shouldn’t be remembered for what it was the last two or three years. It should be remembered what it was in its heyday.”
There are more than 300 employees at Stewart-Haas. A majority of them are headed for new opportunities or a different chapter in life. Some will stay with co-owner Gene Haas as he begins Haas Factory Team, out of the same building, next season.
Joey Logano finds it hard to find one word or a succinct way to describe the team’s legacy, but its success and what it’s done for people in the industry easily come to mind.
“They won a lot,” Logano told ESPN. “What Tony did there, being a driver that jumped into the ownership role and was successful at it, that’s the first time it happened in a long time when he did that. And then obviously adding teams to it and all that. It was pretty impressive to see.
“It’s sad to see it go, but they also should be proud of what they achieved with their championships and the impact they made in the sport for everybody. There were a lot of jobs there and in our industry. There’s a lot of people who have really benefited having them around.”
Sunday at Martinsville Speedway and Phoenix Raceway a week later will be the swan songs for Stewart-Haas. In the end, the organization will have run 1,986 NASCAR national series races.
“We just did what we loved to do, and that’s win races,” Zipadelli said. “I’m just having a really hard time getting over that it’s done and it’s kind of blown up and [we’re] moving on.”
Source: www.espn.com