Without plans beyond the 2024 season, Josh Berry and the No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing team are building their résumé for potential employers.
After the news of SHR closing its doors at season’s end broke last month, the job search began for the entire organization.
While it’s easy to look ahead to the future, 19 weeks of racing are still to be had this season.
Instead of folding, Berry’s team, led by championship-winning crew chief Rodney Childers, is continuing to pour its best efforts at the race track.
This weekend at Iowa Speedway may have been the team’s best showing.
After a strong third-place qualifying effort, Berry was a contender throughout the entirety of the Iowa Corn 350.
The rookie driver snagged 15 bonus points for finishing stage one and two inside the top 10 before placing seventh at the checkered flag. He led 32 laps.
“I thought we had a really good race and a really good car,” Berry said. “To score stage points like we did, we had some great restarts in there and just that last restart didn’t really go our way.
“We lost a little bit of track position and just could never get it back but, all in all, just really proud of everybody on the 4 team. They did a great job. That was a lot of fun, for sure.”
Shortly after, Childers voiced his impressions of the evening, stating he felt “We had a fast car, Josh did a great job, restarts were good.
“We checked a lot of boxes today,” Childers said. “You know you got to crawl before you can walk and walk before you can run. And we’ve started to do that. I know the last two weeks didn’t really show that. But if you look before that, we’ve got better and better every week and had good runs and feel good about what we’re doing.”
Continuing to do their full-time job is difficult enough. Now with the added layer of job hunting, Childers mentioned the uniqueness of remaining focused on the task at hand.
“A lot of adversity on top of that, so it’s interesting looking for a job all week and still coming and running like this,” Childers said.
“Everybody has stayed focused, keeps racing their hearts out and everybody that we race against knows what the No. 4 car is capable of, the people that I have.
“Josh is just driving his butt off and if he didn’t show that he deserves to be in this series tonight, then something’s wrong. I mean you look back at Darlington (third), you look at here, you look at Richmond (11th), you know he’s doing a really good job.”