The 33-year-old, Josh Berry, has been trying to make his mark in his rookie season for Stewart-Haas Racing. But looking at his finishes, he still has a long way to go. Could this be because he is under a lot of pressure? Well, if we look at it… he is currently filling the shoes of one of the greatest in NASCAR, Kevin Harvick, and is now working alongside the #4 team’s legendary crew chief, Rodney Childers. And if this is not pressure enough, Childers recently came out to express how he was hoping for a better finish from his driver at Richmond.

While the former Hendrick Motorsports substitute driver achieved his season-best result with an 11th-place finish last week, his crew chief said he could have done more. Not only did he tell where he exactly wanted Berry to finish, but he also let slip the reason that kept him from finishing in that spot.

Josh Berry running second to Martin Truex Jr is a great deal, thinks his crew chief

Childers recently joined Steve Post and Todd Gordon as a guest on the ‘MRN Crew Call’ podcast, where he shared his thoughts on the past Sunday’s race. When the hosts asked for his take on Josh Berry finishing P11 despite a good car, the 47-year-old explained things from his end.

Childress said, “Yeah, we felt like we had a great car from the time we unloaded. Practice went really really well, and we didn’t have a good qualifying effort just from having to go out really early. But overall, you know, Josh didn’t get down about that. He had a ton of confidence going into the race and honestly, the rain didn’t phase him at all. You know, put the rain tires on and all, he had a ton of confidence to start the race. And he was ready to go, and it was awesome to see him be able to drive through the field like that and have a good car. You know to sit there and run second to Martin at Richmond is a huge deal.”

“Our team has continued to grow over the year, and obviously, we had a good run at Bristol and some other places. But we kind of just needed to do that one more time, I think. And yeah we didn’t end up finishing where we should have. I thought we probably had a second-place car and should have been able to finish there. But we had a couple of bad stops, one of them was our fault, and one of them wasn’t our fault,“ continued Childers.

These pit troubles even gave the crew chief a bit of déjà vu, as he remembered, “I mean, it’s just so hard to get inside that orange box. And it’s so easy to get a penalty. Also, we were leading the race there, a few years back and had everybody destroyed. And Kevin [Harvick] ran over the orange box and had to do a ‘drive through’ [penalty] and lost the race.” 

Other than pit troubles, there was also this one other thing that probably ended up costing Berry a valuable race result.

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Josh Berry started the race with wet-weather tires due to damp conditions. Despite qualifying at the back of the field, he made some good progress, moving from 30th to 15th early on. As the race progressed, Berry continued to slice through the pack, even running inside the Top 5s and Top 10s. But it was during this time that Berry made contact with Daniel Suarez, which led to the #99 spinning out and causing a caution.

Fortunately, neither driver sustained significant damage, but there was a heated exchange of words post-race. No matter what Suarez said, the new SHR driver was not willing to take the blame on this one. See this video and decide for yourself who was in the wrong.

Seems like this is not the kind of mark Josh Berry would have hoped to make. But who knows? Maybe this new potential rivalry is what makes him the talk of the town. But who do you think was at fault? How do you see the 33-year-old rookie performing this year?

Josh Berry Narrowly Avoids Catastrophe After Wild 360-Spinout at Bristol