Kevin Harvick's Happy Hour presented by NASCAR on FOX - Richard Childress Interview

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

In Episode 62 of 'Kevin Harvick's Happy Hour,' Kevin Harvick is joined by Richard Childress, the Founder and CEO of Richard Childress Racing! Kevin and Richard discuss Dale Earnhardt's influence on NASCAR and how Richard got started in racing. Plus, they reflect on their favorite moments from Kevin's time driving for RCR. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

That night at the campfire, we were talking, and he said, I told him, I said, Dale, if anything ever happens to me, you know you got to go on and race the next week. You'd have had to win on Phoenix race. And he said, well, if ever happens to me, you've got to do that. And I thought about that. I was going to quit until I thought about that. Welcome to Kevin Harvick's happy art presented by NASCAR on Fox. And this week's guest, I have been. looking forward to for a while is Richard Childress. And Richard, I can't tell you how excited I am

to have you sitting in this chair. I know that, you know, for me, you, RCR was a great part of my career. But to have you here today, I just appreciate you taking the time. Well, thank you, Kevin. It's, man, I think back 25 years. And did you ever think that we'd be sitting in here? You'd be a TV star, a podcast star, and one great race driver. So, you know, man, how's time has flown away from us? Yeah, and, you know, I think back to a lot of those moments and whether it was you or Mike Helton talking about enjoying whether it was the banquet. And I remember like it was yesterday, hey, we need to go into whoever's, I think it was Jeff

Gordon's championship party in 2001. And it's like, hey, you got to go into this party and just at least say hi and congratulate them and make sure that that. you go in and because you just never know what's going to happen next. And I think that that was always something that I remembered. And to be able to, you know, come into this sport and have the leadership that whether it was you or Mike or whatever I was doing wrong, you know, went a long ways into into my career. So I appreciate that. And it's, it's fun to have you here. But let's get started with this. I want to start about this year. And, you know, I think when, when you look at

this year. You started last year with Kyle and to be able to kind of get that ball rolling right off the bat with race wins and then second half of the year kind of up and down. Get started this year. Same thing, right? I thought, man, you had a shot to win the Daytona 500. Talk to me about the ups and downs of the year. You've made some changes throughout the year and just where the performance and your team is at after almost winning the race again yesterday. Yeah. Well, we're We've spent one of those years, you know, crashes. We've been involved in so many crashes. I think Austin Rick was involved in the first six races this year.

So I put him so far behind. Kyle, he's been involved in several crashes. I talked to him this morning, and he said, maybe I should have been a little more patient. But, you know, when you got somebody breathing in your back, you're leading a race with 20, 25 to go. If you just make the move, you think, it's right and I told him I said, man, don't worry, we're going to win some races and it's been a tough

year, but everybody has fought hard. We see that we got to make some changes and we've got more changes coming. You're going to be hearing about the next month probably. And we're excited about next year. You know, you can't dwell on the past. You got to learn from the past. You know, history teaches you and that's what we got to learn from is what happened this year and take it in the next year with a positive attitude that we're not going to do it. Yeah, and you've always been pretty aggressive when it was time to make changes. You have this extreme balance between being patient, and then it's like, okay, I'm ready to, I'm ready to make those changes. And we saw you change competition directors. We saw you make

some changes within the teams, with crew chiefs. And I think that, you know, that's always something that I've respected from what you do, is you're always so in the middle of the teams. Are you more involved, less involved? Because from the outside looking in, it looks like you're still pretty heavily involved. Yeah, I'm still involved. You know, I try to, I don't micromanage. I caught myself doing that quite a few years ago. Maybe even when you were driving, I was probably micr managing too much.

But, you know, we got the PBR teams, we've got the whiner, we've got a lot of things going on that I really enjoy doing. And I kind of leave a lot of this up to them. But I'm involved. I was there this morning. and we were talking about both cars, how we were far off we were when we got there, and then both of them were really good at the end of the day. When you look at this car, and I think Kyle is a great example,

and with the old car, Kyle could do things that were just unbelievable because you could lean on that side force, and you could put yourself in a position to where you could get out of it. And it seems like with this car, even like yesterday, you get in those spots where it just takes a little bit of air off the car and you spin out. And we've seen Kyle do that several times just because he pushes so hard. How have you seen it change from the team standpoint? We've talked about from the driver's standpoint, but how has it changed the way that you function as a team with having to buy the

parts from the vendors, NASCAR controlling so much? How has that changed what you guys do from the team side of things and just how you run the company and prepare the cars? Yeah. Well, this car, Kevin, has became such an, engineer driven car. And when we very first started it, I felt really good about this car. And then they kept taking spoiler away and adding horsepower. And they were doing so much to it. And now it's so hard to pass.

Before you had enough of spoiler, you could, it's always been tough to pass. But I think the changes they've made has been difficult for the racing. That's my opinion. As a company, we were going to. end up having to lay a lot of people off. I think about 40 people when we got this car because we build our own chassis and do so much work at RCR. Instead, now we're doing a lot of military work. We're doing a lot of other outside work. And we've actually hired more people and looking to hire more people now for some of that kind of work. And I'll take the big responsibility for my

employees and her family. Yeah, I think that that, you know, I think that that is probably one of the, of the things that I learned will kind of shift gears here because when we can transfer transfer right from you caring about your employees today all the way back to 2001. Obviously, we were in a difficult spot with everything that happened with Dale. Tell us about where you were in that time frame, you know, with everything that happened from Dale. And I remember you telling me this like it was yesterday. We have to keep racing for the families of RCR. And it seems, when I hear you say that just now, nothing has changed. And I think when you look all the way back to 2001, that was the main reason that you decided to race, was it not? Yeah. It's a long story,

but Dale and I were on a mountain hunting and his horse flipped over backwards. I could talk about it for an hour. I went off the mountain, busted my nose, got back to Camp. that night, busts my chest up. He grabs him up and says, why did you pull my horse off the mountain? You know, Dale. But that night at the campfire,

we were talking, and he said, I told him, I said, Dale, if anything ever happens to me, you know you got to go on and race the next week.

You'd have had to win on in Phoenix and race. And he said, well, if it ever happens to me, you've got to do that. And I thought about that. I was going to quit until I thought about that.

And so I knew we had to do it keep things going for our company. And you were the right person at the right time. When I look back at 2001, you know, I remember that day. I remember not much about it. And let's see, I wrote it down. I, you know, I remember, I remember that we race 71 times because we didn't have, we raced both national series. We ran the first truck race at KHA. Delane and I got married. We had a wedding, a party, and we raced that weekend. But the main things I remember from that year was the conversation to drive the car, the conversation to run both series, our wedding, and I drank my first bottle of wine. Do you remember that? Oh, yeah. That's another

$12,000 bottle of 1945. That's right. And I remember going to ground zero. And I think we when I look back at that, and I had to write all this stuff down because I can't remember what I did yesterday. But those are, when you think about the rest of the things that happened that year with Dale's death, went in our first race, we won the Bush Series championship. I remember nothing about the Bush banquet. I don't know about you, but I don't even remember going. And, you know, so what are the things that from that year that you look back and say, man, How in the world did we even get through it?

Because those are some of the highs. I know we all know the low with everything that happened. But what were some of the things from 2001 that stick out to you from that year? That you actually remember, not just seen. Because I've seen a lot, but I don't remember much. Yeah, and it's like me. My memory is a little bit further away today. But I think the things I remember about it is how everybody pulled together so hard.

and I ain't saying it because you're sitting here. I've said it before is I don't know of another driver that could have got in that car under the circumstance and the pressure of driving that Dale Earnhardt got. And you drove the car as he was driving, had been driving. And that could have did what we did. But the thing I remember that stands out is how much we all pull together.

And I think winning your first race at Atlanta, seeing Dale Jr. win, seeing I think it was parks, it was so many healing moments that sport needed. And I think it started with your win in Atlanta, the third race and going out there and winning it. Those are the things I remember is a lot of those things were the healing moments that we all needed at that time. Yeah. And I think, you know, to go back and just, you know, you think. about Atlanta. I remember, I remember taking the pass three wide and I remember the crowd and the noise coming from the crowd on, on that particular day. But I don't remember anything from

Victory Lane. I don't remember coming to the start finish line. I remember the people hanging on the back straightaway fence. They would climb up onto the back straightaway fence coming to get the white flag. But there are so many things that are just blank. And I think for, for me, the emotions that went with that particular season were just so confusing because I didn't know whether to get out of the car and cheer and be happy after we won the race. I didn't know it was, it just,

I think we had so much to do and there was so much on everybody's mind that you didn't really have the time to even think about what was going on. So it was just a, it was just a very, a very strange time as you look back on all that. But I want to get back to this bottle of one. Because I have a feeling, as many things as people don't know, when I started, we went to it, we went to the first race, which was Rockingham.

We got through the week. We got on the airplane and we flew to Las Vegas early. And, you know, after the Rockingham race, we got on a helicopter and we were flying out of the racetrack. We got on the wrong helicopter with Jeff and Brooke Gordon. We had to fly back to the racetrack, get on a different helicopter to go to a different airport. and Delane and I flew to Las Vegas to get ready for the wedding. So we had the wedding, got married, had the whole team there, which was kind of a blessing in disguise just because of everything that was going on.

It got everybody away from North Carolina, got to Las Vegas early. And then we go to the racetrack and we get our first top ten. I'm flying home with Richard, and he says, you know, I bought this bottle of wine this week. And I think it was the year that you were born, right? 1945. Yeah, so it was a 1945 bottle of wine and he picks this bottle of wine up and he says you win the race this year, we're going to drink this wine

together. I'd never drank a bottle of wine in my life. And I don't think that, I don't know if we really thought we would actually win a race that year, but it was a 1945 bottle of what? Chateau Muton. Chateau Muton. Yeah. And you were so proud of that bottle of wine and we got to, so we won Atlanta and we got done with the race. And I said,

we're going to drink that bottle of wine. And we got to his house, and do you remember the whole process? Oh, yeah. I can still remember a lot. Tell him what happened. At my house. That's your house. Yeah, well, first I had a bottle of 95.

I built this home and had a big wine cellar. And I wanted something that I could, you know, something you could talk about in the wine cellars. You carried people. So I found this special bottle of wine. And so I broke out some 95 muton that I had. it was really good. So we'd break out this bottle of 45, and I'm looking around there. There's Kevin Hamlin and you and Kevin's first wife, I think it was.

And, man, I sit in there and I said, $12,000. They've never drank a bottle of wine like this in her life. And I remember us all sitting around the dining room table. Do you remember the cork? Do you remember what happened to the cork? It'd come apart. Oh, it came apart. And he had to strain this, he had to strain this bottle of wine because the cork was from

1945. And the cork went on a bottle. And Richard did not really want to open this bottle of wine. But we sat there. And that was the first bottle of wine that I ever drank was that 1945 bottle that you had, that you had born. I think the other thing that sticks out, and this is just kind of how 2001 went. We had the, you know, the everything that happened at Ground Zero with the Twin Towers.

And this moment stuck out to me. You had a friend of yours that was doing a lot of the construction at Ground Zero that took us down into Ground Zero at that particular time. But that's one of those images to me that stuck out from that year. And I think that was, gosh, I mean, that was just one of those moments where it was myself and you and Kevin Hamlin and several of us that walked. And you'd see buildings that were offices that just had people's offices that looked like. they were still working in them and then he had this pile of rubbish that that we were that that they were trying to get to the bottom of but that was really the way that we that we closed out 2001 and and I don't know what you remember about that trip but for me it was it was one of those memories that

has stuck with me for my whole life since yeah yeah d h griffin was a friend of mine and he's one that got us seeing up there and carried us around and showed us but you know that was 2001 was one of the strangest years i'd ever been through in my in my life told you about this year. I think it's even getting a stranger, but that was, that was something that I think we all needed to see to understand how important America is. And I think we are in the most patriotic sport out there. And I think us showing it, when Robbie Gordon won New Hampshire, we took that money and we gave it to the firemen. And I talked Robbie. I said, let's, let's give his money to the New York Fire Department. We took all the windings and gave them.

They postponed the race and we ran it later. It was supposed to be run earlier. But just seeing us up there were hard hats. I gave us them to go down there. Still have them. Yeah. I have them sitting in my office still. I think I still got one. I have mine too. I'm pretty sure. I got a whole room full of collectible. Sometimes you'd have just got so much of your stuff in it. He wouldn't believe up there. But you've been to the museum. Yep. And I carried Catelyn up there, the other. And that was cool to see you guys walking through that museum.

See a lot of your history is sitting in that museum. When you look back and you look, when you walk through that museum and you see all the things that you've been able to accomplish throughout your career, could you have imagined that from where you started? And, you know, just going from driver or owner to driver and then back to owner and all the things that you've experienced. Have you ever thought about just putting all that together and writing a book about everything that you've done? Because it is, I just don't know that you can talk to enough people to tell the stories and things that you've been through. And it's just unbelievable the amount of things that you've been able to accomplish, not only in this sport, but in life in general. You know, Kevin, it's, I like to start out by saying when I start talking to groups, I used to speak to a lot of groups before COVID. I'd start out by saying only in America, only in America could a kid with a $20 race car

and a dream be sitting here tonight on this show with you. And that's where I started. And I try not to ever think about anything that, you know, sometime I'll ride around and I'll pull in at the wine or something. And I'll say, how in the hell did this happen? I really don't know other than just saying I'm surrounding myself with some great people throughout life. Yeah. What was that first car that you bought for 20 bucks?

Oh, 47 Plymouth. 47 Plymouth. Where'd you race it at? Baltimore Grace Stadium. No kidding. In the claiming division. Yeah. And that was my first race.

I even had a partner, Jerry Cooper on it. No kidding. It's funny, I can remember that. Yeah. But then we went and we became a two-car team the third week because we both wanted to drive. And so we figured we'd just go get another car. Paid $40 for that one. What do you think the biggest NASCAR moment?

I know that we've talked about, was it Talladega when you had to run for? 1960. Yeah. Was that kind of the biggest moment for you as far as establishing a team? Or what do you think the biggest moment was for establishing RCR to go forward? Aside from Hiring Dale Earnhardt, there had to be something. Yeah, but I mean there had to be something leading to the point to get to the Earnhardt piece of it. Was it the Talladega race?

Yes. What it did is Bill Senior paid us some money to come. Back then we got deal money. And I left there that day, I had an old 54 Ford truck with a car on the back of it, had a Camaro, and we'd run that. They'd pay you some in cash back then. And Mary Bruner, we'd write you a check. I got back home, and I said, man, I had never seen this much money in my life.

It was like $3,000 or $3,000. So I bought a piece of land, built a garage, and started working on cars and building wreck cars and racing on the weekends. So you actually had a different business aside from the racing business, right? Yes, back, no, I didn't then. They didn't then?

No, I worked at Douglas Battery. I was building batteries back in 69. Oh, my gosh. But I told him I wanted to go to Daytona racing, and I never forget Mr. Douglas said, biggest mistake you'll ever make. You didn't even hear it. So here we are today.

Yeah. Well, you know, I think that all those, all those things, you know, lead to something. And, you know, I think for, for me personally, you know, I look back at 1999. And I had, I had just gone to Liberty Racing, which was Brad Doherty and Jim Herrick at the time to race their truck. And I went there at the end of 98 and sat down in Ohio, signed a letter of intent to race their truck in 99, race their truck in 99, race their truck in 99, somewhere along the line, I guess I signed a three-year contract at that table that night to commit myself to run in this truck. But at that time, the sport really blew up.

And I think it was very similar to kind of some of the situation that we've been in over the last five years where you had a lot of drivers that were kind of at the end of their career. And you team owners went to start looking for young drivers. And so 99, I get a call from you. I get a call from Joe Gibbs and Cal Wells. And at that time, I was going through it with Hornarday and my dad. My dad came to me and he's like, I really think you should just go cup racing for Cal Wells. And I was like, I don't know. I really want to go race for RCR because I wanted to race with, I wanted to race with Dale.

That was really where I wanted to be. we really started pursuing trying to figure out everything to happen at RCR in 99. Well, I just signed this contract. And I remember you telling me, you're like, you're more than welcome to drive here, but you've got to get yourself out of your contract first. And that was really one of the first lessons that I learned along the way because I had to put a second on my house. And I had to go get a loan to buy myself out of the contract after we negotiated.

And we lived off of Delana's credit cards for three months because I had spent everything that I had to buy myself out of the contract. But tell me about that time period for the team owners and the drivers and why there was this explosion of everybody going and looking for young drivers to fill those seats. You know, I think I've been fortunate to see it. that turnover probably five times or six maybe, you know, with the Gordons and all of the other guys that retired and used right retiring. You know, it would go through those cycles, but that was a year that we knew we had to have someone. Dale and I had talked about what he had in mind on down the line, and I knew I had to find

the right people someday when it was time what he wanted to do to get out of the car in the future. nothing like what happened. But I never will forget talking to you. And I said, I think you and Hornaday, you were staying at his house or something. I live there. I watched you race at Bakersville, I think, and you were driving, you driving a 75?

The Spears car, yeah. Yeah. And I remember y'all beating out of each other or something. I said, what's going to happen if he's right in front of you? you kind of to check her flag, he said, I'm going to win the race. I'll forget you, you probably don't remember. I remember little things like that, but you said, I'm going to win the race. Yeah.

So I said, this is the kind of driver I want right now. Yeah, and, you know, I think for that beginning part of that time period, not only were you guys looking for drivers, but you had this influx of money that came into the sport. So you wind up with the A.C. Delco sponsorship, and I think Hornaday, they had decided. to move Hornaday and he had a Napa sponsorship and things were changing at DEI. So we wound up with the A.C. Delco sponsorship. Well, we go through 2000, run the year.

And we decided we're going to go cup racing. And we go cup racing. Do you remember this whole scenario with all the sponsorship decisions that we had to make? I think it wasn't it. AOL. We had AOL. We had AOL. And it wasn't singular at the time. It was like it was right before the next tail or next tail or. whatever the sponsor was. But we came, we went to, at the end of 2000, we had a good year, and we decided that we were going to go race cup. Well, we went to AOL for the meeting. I remember that. And we go up there and we were wowed. I mean, they had a great presentation. They were presenting all the teams at this particular time, why you should go with these particular

companies, because you only had cars that would have one sponsorship at the time. So myself and Richard and the staff at RCR go up to AOL. And we get back. to the airport and we sit down. You remember this in the hangar? We sat down in the hangar office and said, okay, do we think that we should go with AOL? And that day, you made us call singular and whoever the other sponsor was to tell them that we weren't going to use their sponsorship. My God, how things have changed. It is. And today, you know, you got three or four, sometimes five sponsors to get through a year. It's very few that has one. But back in those days, people were trying to beat the doors down to get in.

And I think the Sorvelling Oxley Act, where the CEOs have to be so careful about what they do, really changed Sorvelling Oxley Act. I think I'm saying it right. Change the way that CEOs did business. Yeah. And so they had to be responsible. If they said, okay, I want to go spend X amount of dollars on these cars. numbers were fantastic back in the days that we were getting for sponsorship.

Yeah. And I think when you look back at that time period and you talked about seeing me race, but we built a team at that particular time into 99, into 2000, and we had a group of guys that was young. It was myself, Mike Dillon, Todd Barrier, Gil Martin wound up in the mix. but it was a lot of the guys that worked in your system at your shop. And we had a group of people that were like that. And we raced and we raced and we raced.

And I think when you look back to that 2000 time period and you look back at expanding that team, it really dispersed a lot of people into not only your company, but into the sport that became key cruise chiefs, engineers. But, you know, I think when you look back at that, it was myself and Mike Dillon. And Mike and I tested a lot. And I think when I look back and I look at all the things that we were able to do, whether it was 2000, 2001, Mike was a big part of that. But I think some of those stories are fun because you actually, Mike is your son-in-law. It's married to Tina. But having to take Mike out of the car was one of those things that I look back at now, and he and I laugh about it.

What was the conversation like with Mike? Because I think it came after he wrecked at Texas, right? His eyeballs popped out of his head. Is that correct? Yeah. He said, all he was hollering was, I want my mama. I will forget that. And yeah, it was, he had to get out of it. You had to do grand babies. And I said, man, you don't need to be driving this thing. Yeah. Well, you know, when I look back at that at that time period with all the cars and people and things that that we were able to to accomplish at that particular time. Mike was always, always one of my favorite pieces of the puzzle because it was always entertaining and

very interesting and kept everything, everything on edge. When you go back to the, when you go back to the, I guess the beginning with, with Dale and you look at all the things that you guys were able to accomplish and you go to the end of Dale's career. What was kind of the,

we know how it all wound up and we know that I wound up driving the car. What was, what was the end? Like, was he going to drive two more years, three more years, or was it kind of a moving target with him? I ain't going to answer that right now, but he was, we talked more about it in 2000. Yeah. And I knew our plans. And I'm sure, Teresa, knew our plans, nobody was going to know what he was going to do with me, Judy, Tracy and him. Yeah. And I know what he had in mind. It was that little after 2000.

It just didn't end like we wanted it. And, you know, 98, we won the Daytona 500 and about halfway through the year there. We wasn't running good. I changed crew chiefs. Yeah. Got the car a little better. But he said, man, it's me. I said, it ain't there.

We're not giving you cars you can drive. We've got to fix the cars. And I wish now to say, yeah, it was you go to retire. Yeah. It's too late. Yeah. And, you know, I think when I came into those cars, I really think that those cars were prepared to win a championship. Because I don't think there's any way that we have the success that we do because I started testing those cars in 2000. Yeah. And because Dale, he would go to Daytona and he would go to Indy. And that was really all he would go test pretty much, right?

So I think we had seven tests at that particular time that we could go do. And I wound up doing the other five. Yeah. And when you go back and you look at all the time that we spend at Kentucky and the things that General Motors had put in place to go and test to try to put those cars in a position to be able to win a championship, we put a ton of time into those cars in 2000. And, you know, one of my favorite stories in 2000 was we had been at Kentucky and we went for like three months. And Bobby Hutchins. was in charge of the testing program that we had put in place. So we tested this car, and you probably remember this story, but it was car of 51, and it was the car that I always tested and drove, and Dale didn't like it. So it's odd that I remember the number of the cars, but so we tested this car, and they loaded up, we got it as good as we could, and we had just started developing the shocks and things with simulation and take it to Indy.

Do you remember this? Remember some of it. I don't know where the ends go. So we take this car from Kentucky to Indy, and we unload the first car, and Dale goes out and drives his car. We unload the second car, which is the car we've been testing, and he runs nine-tenths of a second faster. And at that time, it was the evolution of the three-fives and a two. We had three, 500-pound springs and a 200-pound spring, and it was when the cars were starting to get low. And we had figured all the shocks and everything out to go with that. And he asked him, he said, well, why is this car so much faster?

They said, well, it's got three, 500 pounds springs and 200 pounds springs. And he said, I am not driving that car. Put that piece of shit back in the trailer. Right now, there is no way that that's safe. And that was kind of the beginning of the relationship that Dale and I had. And we went to Homestead and tested and kind of had some good results. And we got to Phoenix. And do you remember him chewing our ass after practice?

after his press conference. Was it when we went to Key West, was it? No. No. Okay. Yeah. He got tore up over that one too. Yeah, he was mad at us because he didn't know we were testing his car.

And we wound up being fast. And then at Phoenix, he got there and had to answer all the retirement questions because I was out driving his car. And that was the first time that I really was able to kind of be a smart ass to Dale in a way to where he was kind of like, Yeah, who is this kid? But, you know, it was just, it was just one of those things that, you know, you had to get to know, Dale. And I had just kind of started to get to know him over the testing piece of it. And he brought myself and Kevin Hamlin and Dale Jr. just happened to walk by at the wrong time.

And we walked up in the trailer and he ripped our ass because we were putting him in a bad position because we were out there, out there testing his car. But that that was fun. Do you remember the two races we ran in the ARCA at Charlotte? I think Talladega was in. You finished second and third. That opened my eyes. I said, this kid's going to be. That was 99.

Yeah, I lost to Kirk Shelburden at the Arka race. He was the guy that beat me. I can remember that I just knew. And then we went, I think it was the first race you ran at Daytona. I think he ran in the Xfinite. it could have been the fall, the second race, but you run

second to Bobby Labani out of the and I remember I said, this kid's going to be good. I told Mike Hilton and there we'll forget yeah, I had a pretty good. I see what this kid's going to be. He's a real deal. Well, it was a, it was a great ride and I enjoyed, I enjoyed

everything about it. But I think, you know, when I look back at a lot of those moments in things, I did a lot of really dumb things. I climbed over cars and things like that. And we were always into controversy. But I always got the feeling.

And I've always wanted to ask you this because I think I'm right, but I'm going to ask you anyway. I always thought that you enjoyed that part of it. And that fueled me to be, I always expected, I always thought the expectation out of myself was I better go after his ass or I better do what I need to do because I thought that was the expectation that you. you had? Is that the case? Because I enjoyed it and I love being a part of it, but I always thought that you kind of enjoyed it other than you had to deal with the controversy.

I've lived off of that. That's right. I love it. I was earned hard. I never would forget. Jerry Mayfield pushed him out of the way up at Pocono, and he's screaming on the radio. We was going to win the race and knocked him out of the tone. Richard, Richard, don't you go over there? Don't you go over there. But I love that kind of, you know, it just made it more fun back in. Today, if you look at somebody wrong, you'll get fine almost. Yeah.

Well, I enjoyed that part of it, too. You did good. We had a lot of good times, man. Yeah, we did. When I look back and I think of all my teammates and people that I raced with, I thought that the best driver that I ever raced with was Robbie Gordon. I thought that he had the most, I mean, I never got. got to race with Dale, so I can't even compare to him. Of the drivers that I got to race with,

I thought Robbie had the most raw talent. Did you see it that way? I mean, he had, you know, his own ideas and different things and wanted to go, but I thought he had the best natural car ability of any driver that I raced with. You're exactly right. I think he had the, all the ability. We just couldn't ever get across that hump with him. And if he could have just focused said, I'm going to be a Winston Cup champion. I want a race, and that's all I want to do. He could have done it. But, you know, it's like everybody.

They've got their own mind and their own ideas. There's so many different things that come with this sport that people don't understand. Now, back to the book, I'm going to write that when he's done. I hope so. I'll tell two or three stories sometime. We'll be sitting around or on the airplane or something. I've got to tell some of them stories. Have you been writing them down?

Does anybody write them down? I did about a two-eye, about a whole day of probably six hours or seven. And we just recorded a bunch of my, a friend of mine, Rhonda Rich. She's one of the most famous book writers, and she's been talking to me about it. And so her and her husband came up and they sat there and we talked for about, I don't know, six, seven hours or get a whole day and put it on tape. And so that's the start of it. who knows where to go from there. At least I got that part done.

I think it would be fantastic. I got some really wild stories and some I can't tell. Yeah, well, some of them don't need to be told. But I think just the ones you can tell would be good. Oh, yeah, that'd be fun. So last question, and everybody gets it. What was the first car that you drove on the street? What was your first car that you bought and that you used for a daily driver?

You know, the very first car, I remember the very first vehicle I drove. It was an old 35 Ford pickup out around the fields at the home. I was out there doing donuts and got in trouble for that. But a 50 Ford was probably my very first one. I had some big old Osmobiles that I used for things besides home pleasure, you know. So things that we could do back in the days, you know, that you wouldn't want to do today. But I had some, that 50 Ford was the very first car that I had, you know. Yeah. Was there ever one that you drove that you raced as well?

I raced them all, but on the street. Don't do it today. You can't do it today. But yeah, we've not on the race tracks. Yeah, raced them on the street. Good stuff. Wherever. Well, I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you, buddy. I enjoy it. Thanks for coming here. I appreciate everything you've done for my career. We could do this. We'll just have to pick different segments of time that we have to talk about because we could probably talk for three hours.

30 minutes won't cover much. It won't cover all the stuff we got. We had so many great times and fun times and sad times and everything else in our careers. And, you know, winning that race in Atlanta just sticks way out. Yeah. Well, I think that that part sticks out to me, but the fact that we're friends and the way that even though that there was a time period where it was hard to understand where each other was when we decided to go in different directions, I feel.

like the way that I did it and the way that we had the conversation, it allowed us to still be great friends and respect the time that we had together. So I appreciate that. Yeah, and I appreciate the way you did that. You were a man about it. Yeah. Not like something. You did a great job. Well, good luck for the rest of the year and thanks for taking the time. We'll get that race for Kyle. There you go. Well, I want to thank Richard Childers for taking the time to come sit in the chair today and have a great conversation with us. I know that we could have probably talked about a lot of things that are happening in today's NASCAR world. But I had fun going down memory lane,

and I hope Richard will come back soon. And we could probably fill that segment three or four more times. So one of my favorite people that I've ever been around in this sport taught me a lot lessons, and I appreciate him coming back to tell a few old stories. So hopefully you enjoyed the listen, and we'll see you next week.