Season Preview: Childers Sees Big Potential with Kvapil, Zilisch for No. 1 Team in ‘26

MOORESVILLE, N.C. (Feb. 10, 2026) – Rodney Childers begins his first season with JR Motorsports with a stacked lineup behind the wheel.

He’s also beginning his first season in the last 24 years in a different series after spending the previous 23 years at the Cup Series and doing quite spectacularly well. How well? He has the 2014 NASCAR Cup Series Championship with driver Kevin Harvick, 38 victories at the Cup level, along with an equal number of runner-up finishes and a total of 94 top-three results. Add 157 top-fives in 434 starts and you have a resume built for the NASCAR Hall of Fame at some point in the future.

This year, he’ll change gears a bit as the crew chief of the No. 1 team with JRM and drivers Carson Kvapil and Connor Zilisch.

TEAM ROSTER: Crew chief: Rodney Childers; Lead Engineer: Eric Long; Second Engineer: Dillon Morley; Car Chief: Mike Hoffman; Mechanic: Greg Buchanan; Mechanic: Sean Verwys; Spotter: T.J. Majors (Kvapil), Stefan Parsons (Zilisch); Truck Driver: Adam Lowe.

TITLE HOPES: That experience at the Cup level could translate very quickly to a NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series championship

“I think the biggest thing for me is just more like the old Cup cars in a way,” he said. “They’re more like what I grew up doing and more like what I’ve been successful at doing. So far, it’s been a ton of fun just to get back to working on these types of cars and to work in this building with this group.”

The move to JRM in the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series from Spire Motorsports also entails a paradigm shift in that he’ll have more than one driver in the No. 1 car this season. It’s something he has done before.

“It’s been refreshing, and the driver part of it, going back and forth, it’s a little different, but I also had to do that for a couple of years Michael Waltrip Racing when I had Mark Martin for 20 races and Brian Vickers for some races and had Michael in three superspeedway races. So, I definitely have some experience of switching drivers back and forth.”

That’s a good thing, he said.

“It keeps you motivated at the same time because each person might need a little bit of something different. Each person has a different personality. You know, you might have to talk to one guy differently than another guy. I feel like overall it makes you stronger in a way because you have different opinions of the cars and how to make them better. It’s going to keep pushing us more and more every week.”

DIFFERENT STROKES: Making the move to JRM and the NOAPS is going to be different, Childers said.

“I’ve raced in the Cup Series only for 23 years,” Childers said. “I had a lot of thinking to do this past year…you know, what’s the right thing for me? What’s going to make me happy? What am I going to have fun with? What’s the best thing for my family? And it was something that I had to think hard on. Do you wait around and hope that the right Cup opportunity comes back around? Or do you take something where you get to work for your best friend in a way, and you also get to work with two of the sport’s young talents that have a bright future?”

Helping to mold Kvapil and Zilisch into future champions at the highest level of the sport had its appeal.

With those two up-and-coming drivers, Childers has drivers on the ascent in the series. Zilisch won nine races last year and made the Championship 4. Kvapil was very consistent and showed he belonged in his rookie season.

“Our job is to help them and hopefully mold them a little bit into what is going to end up making them a Cup champion one day,” Childers said. “I’ve gone home every night with a smile on my face and enjoying it and having fun. I think, you know, even though they were both pretty much rookies last year in the O’Reilly Series, they’re both kind of on different levels now, you know, with Connor moving to Cup racing. You know, the NOAPS is kind of a side note for him. And I really wanted to put most of his focus on the Cup car, and I know that’s what’s most important. I’ve kind of left him alone in a way and let him do his thing. And then, as we come up to his races, we’ll… communicate more and we’ll go to the simulator and all those things.

“With Carson, it’s the opposite,” he continued, “We’ve spent… almost every day around each other the entire winter. We’ve been to the simulator probably eight or nine times already. We’re working on races two, three months out. But, you know, for him, he wants to up his game and do better, of course, than what he did last year, and he’s working really hard to be able to do that.”

Kvapil’s father, Travis, was a NASCAR Truck Series champion, and Carson has won two zMAX CARS Tour titles on his own. He understands how things need to happen.

That appeals to Childers.

“We’re both Mooresville boys, both went to the same high school,” Childers said. “We’ve both grown up doing the same things. I think so far it’s been super-easy to communicate and to talk and to do those things. Bryan (Late Model team manager Bryan Shaffer) and the Late Model program, they’ve built some pretty good drivers, you know, Sam Mayer and others. Carson is a prime example of that. The good thing about Bryan is he’s been around forever, and he’s done a lot of things, and he’s raced on every level. He knows. the right way of racing and the wrong way of racing.”

BRIDGING THE GAP: That old-school lineage is important, Childers said.

“That’s really what’s important with some of these young kids,” he said. “Like, some of them can drive, but they don’t know how to race. They don’t know how to work on their cars. They don’t know how to communicate about the cars. But it seems like every single younger kid that comes out of that shop understands the whole picture. When Josh Berry came to the No. 4 car (at Stewart-Haas Racing) you know, it was immediately, you could tell how smart he was about the car and what was going on and how he needed to talk about it and all those things. And they just go out and they race the right way. They try not to tear things up. try to finish all the laps. They try to do everything the right way.”

EXPERIENCE TELLS: With Zilisch, who advanced to the Cup Series this year, he worked with another crew chief in Mardy Lindley who came from essentially the same school as Childers.

“I think there’s two sides of it,” Childers said. “I mean, there’s old-school crew chief and there’s… I probably, you know, it seems like, you know, from what I can tell so far, me and Mardy do a lot of the same things. You know, we expect the cars to be super-nice. We expect a lot out of our guys. He expects a lot out of Pat, and I expect a lot out of Mike and our engineers.”

Childers also opined that JRM works more like a Cup Series team than a NOAPS team.

MASS APPEAL: Childers said that JRM is much in demand among crew chiefs because of the way it operates.

“A lot of the crew chiefs I’ve talked to have said, ‘man, it’s just different here.’ I thought about this a lot recently. You just feel like you have some skin in the game. You feel like you kind of have some ownership, right? You feel like you have control. It’s not that way at the Cup level. It just depends on where you are. Here, it is left to you, you do your thing and you’re held responsible. Anybody who is a racer…it’s one of those deals where you want the guys to be held responsible and to do their thing and to do what they think is right, but they also need to work together. And make the whole company better too.

“Um, I feel like we have a good group that’s going to push each other all the time to make all of us better. What, in your mind, is a good season for you? I always have high expectations. I mean, if you don’t win five or six races, you haven’t done your job. “I think that’s the goal: to go out and win five or six races and to fight for a championship at the end of the year.”