Kevin Harvick wants Rodney Childers to keep pushing the inspection limits
Kevin Harvick doesn’t want Rodney Childers to change his approach in the wake of his potentially playoff altering suspension at the end of the 2018 season.
Childers was suspended for the final two races of the season after Harvick’s Texas-winning car was found to have an illegal spoiler. That included the championship race at Homestead, where Harvick lost out on the championship to Joey Logano.
It’s far from a guarantee that Harvick wins the title with Childers as his crew chief instead of interim crew chief Tony Gibson. Harvick realizes that. And he hopes Childers keeps pushing NASCAR’s inspection limits in 2019 and beyond.
He made the comments on his SiriusXM radio show Tuesday evening. Via NBC:
“It better not be the last time that he gets suspended because I just don’t think you are pushing it hard enough if you’re not,” Harvick said Tuesday night during his “Happy Hours” show on SiriusXM’s NASCAR channel. “That’s part of racing. Not something I’m going to apologize for at any point in my career just because of the fact I want my crew chief doing what he has to do to make my car go as fast as he can. Try to work within the rules and find the gray area you can and win some and lose some.”
While you may think Harvick is asking Childers to “cheat” to get ahead, if a crew chief isn’t pushing NASCAR’s limits he isn’t trying. What the team did at Texas might have been a little more than a “push” against the rules, but other teams were clearly trying things too. All three of the cars that went back to NASCAR’s research and development center after the Texas race did not pass inspection.
The Texas race was also the second time Harvick had been penalized after a win. He lost points after winning at Las Vegas in the spring because of two separate issues in post-race inspection.
We’ll see how Harvick and Childers continue to push the boundaries in 2019 in a few short months.
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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.
Follow @NickBromberg on Twitter
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