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…
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