Spire Motorsports co-owner Jeff Dickerson knows what it looks like when a young team parts ways with a championship crew chief after just nine races together.
Sure enough, this week’s shocking decision to dismiss Justin Haley’s crew chief, Rodney Childers — who is second on the active crew chief wins list in the NASCAR Cup Series — certainly raised eyebrows around the garage.
What the heck is going on there?
“We know from the outside, it looks like we are just pulling this out of our a— here,” Dickerson told The Athletic on Thursday. “I understand why people would think that. An organization like ours, nine races in, moving a guy who has got 40 Cup wins and a championship? Something really huge had to happen, right? There had to be something that happened.”
But there wasn’t, Dickerson insisted. It turned out Childers and Spire simply weren’t a good fit for one another, Dickerson said, and the decision came down to either making a change now — a somewhat opportune time after the only off week of the season — or hoping for a Band-Aid that would perhaps prolong the inevitable.
“In this sport, you don’t get to date before you get married and move into the house together, and this is just one of those examples where things look good on paper but maybe don’t translate,” Dickerson said. “This wasn’t about results. This wasn’t about speed. You notice the energy is off, the communication is off. It just got to a point where it was like, ‘I’ll just deal with the consequences of this because it’s best for all parties involved.’”
“This wasn’t about results,” Spire Motorsports co-owner Jeff Dickerson said. “You notice the energy is off, the communication is off.” (Jeffrey Vest / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Dickerson said his “mistake” was pairing similar personalities together. Childers is an old-school crew chief and Haley is an old soul driver, Dickerson said; both are also on the quiet side. The team owner, who is a former spotter and driver agent, felt there wasn’t a “spark plug” or “big motor guy” to grab hold of the situation and turn it around.
Now, competition director Ryan Sparks, who is more of Haley’s opposite personality, will crew chief for the No. 7 team during the remainder of the season.
“It doesn’t mean people don’t like each other or everybody did something wrong,” said Dickerson, who repeatedly praised Childers’ credentials and respect level within the garage. “We approached him on it and were pointing out the things I thought where we were at, and we just arrived at the same place.”
Told of Dickerson’s comments, Childers agreed it “just wasn’t working” and didn’t think it was a surprise for the parties to go in different directions based on internal discussions within the team.
There wasn’t much more to add at this time, he told The Athletic.
Still, despite Dickerson’s insistence that no one thing triggered the decision, there will certainly be questions about how this relationship suddenly and quickly ended.
Did Haley want someone different atop the pit box and push for Childers’ departure, with Dickerson covering for him?
The answer is no, Dickerson says. Haley, he said, was informed of the decision after it was made rather than being part of the process. Haley “was as surprised about it as Rodney was,” Dickerson said.
Or was it that Childers was acting as somewhat of a lone wolf within the organization, not working openly with the other crew chiefs (as had been his reputation at one point while crew-chiefing for Kevin Harvick at Stewart-Haas Racing)?
Dickerson said that although he had heard that label “screamed and whispered in the garage” for years and wondered if it could be an issue for Childers at Spire, it wasn’t the case.
“Rodney was a team player, and he wasn’t like that,” Dickerson said. “We never saw that side of him. That’s not what happened here, and I don’t think that part of him was going to emerge. Rodney, for the most part, bought into how we do things.”
Dickerson said he knows it sounds crazy, but the decision was more about differing expectations from both parties that didn’t find common ground.
“It’s not lost on me that it’s like, ‘You’re telling me Spire, who couldn’t even get out of their own way two years ago, is parting ways with a championship-winning guy in Rodney Childers?’” Dickerson said. “But the easy thing here would have been to let it roll, and Spire is not in a position to hope for change; Spire is in a position of needing to cause change.
“In this case, we know we’re putting ourselves in a position to be scrutinized. But this is consistent with our values and what we’ve advised our own clients (as a sports agency) to do forever, and we had to stay true to ourselves.”
(Top photo of Rodney Childers at Atlanta Motor Speedway in February: Jeffrey Vest / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)