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Justin Haley Qualifies 37th in First Race After Rodney Childers's Departure
In one of the year's biggest surprises to date, champion crew chief Rodney Childers announced last Wednesday that he had resigned as Justin Haley's crew chief. Perhaps this served as a distraction since Haley ended up qualifying 37th, slowest of all the full-time chartered teams. However, the crew chief doesn't really matter in forecasting races at Talladega and Haley likely has a lot of value since he is a good drafter in general and has earned two top tens in his last three Talladega starts, including a seventh last fall in his second start after returning to Spire Motorsports last year. It's obviously a crapshoot picking which drivers from the back will get good finishes at Talladega, but Haley is a good drafter and he's definitely capable of it in theory. The issue is whether Spire will have more speed than they did last year when they looked slow on this track type. Perhaps Carson Hocevar's second at Atlanta suggests they've turned a corner.
Source: Racing Reference
Source: Racing Reference
