Dale Earnhardt Jr.: Rodney Childers to Spire is massive missed opportunity for RCR

Earlier on Tuesday, Spire Motorsports announced that Rodney Childers had signed a multiyear agreement to serve as the No. 7 team and Corey LaJoie’s crew chief for 2025 and beyond.

It’s a big acquisition for Spire, as Childers is the most accomplished active crew chief in NASCAR‘s premier series. Spire will soon reap the benefits of having Childers aboard, while other teams will be left scratching their heads, Dale Earnhardt Jr. believes. Speaking on the “Dale Jr. Download,” Earnhardt called it a “missed opportunity” for teams such as Richard Childress Racing, who could have used someone like Childers.

“It’s a missed opportunity or a loss for other teams that may have been interested in Rodney,” Earnhardt said. “Imagine if he had went to RCR with Kyle Busch. Imagine that pairing, Rodney and Kyle together, Kyle wins races, I think gets back to Victory Lane with Rodney. Even Rodney taking [Andy] Petree’s spot over there as sort of the technical director. I think technical director would have been a great hire… It was a missed opportunity for several teams that could have tried to lure Rodney there.”

Speaking to RCR in particular, the once dominant team has fallen under hard times this season. Both Kyle Busch and Austin Dillon have struggled to find speed on a weekly basis, leaving Richard Childress searching for answers.

Rodney Childers takes job with Spire Motorsports

RCR has seen a slight makeover in the last couple weeks with Andy Petree retiring from his role of vice president of competition, an abrupt retirement and quite curious given the race team’s hardships this season. Keith Rodden has taken over in the interim, giving RCR a new look at least in the short-term.

Despite this, Childress acknowledged that “you can’t fix it in the middle of the year.”

“You can’t fix it in the middle of the year,” Childress said this past Saturday. “A lot of it is engineering. I feel that we’re strong in a lot of areas and weak in some of the others. I want to beef up our engineering. We’ve got a lot of stuff that we’re working on and hopefully we can get both of them running better.”

RCR and Childers just wasn’t meant to be and the biggest winner is certainly LaJoie. LaJoie is in the middle of his fourth full-time season with Spire, a season which has been a tough go for him thus far. Through 20 races, he sits 31st in the points standings with one top-five finish. With Childers atop his pit box, LaJoie will look to turn things around next season.

“Plenty of work to do to finish this year strong, but really excited to get the chance to work with a championship winning guy in Rodney next season,” LaJoie wrote on X. “Rodney’s credentials speak for themselves.”