KANSAS CITY, Kan.—When Kyle Larson arrived at Hendrick Motorsports in 2021, he wasn’t sure Cliff Daniels was the right crew chief for the job.
That year, Larson scored a career-high 10 wins and won the NASCAR Cup championship.
Needless to say, Daniels grew on the Larson quickly.
“Cliff has been amazing,” Larson said. “He’s just the type of guy that I really didn’t think I would want (laughs) but I’m glad that I have. I have never been into coaching—I never thought I needed coaching or the motivational speeches and things like that.
“But I knew immediately when I started working with him in 2021 that I really liked his style of crew chief and leadership. Yeah, we’ve worked really well together. He does a really good job of holding me accountable. I don’t think I’ve ever had that before in a crew chief in the Cup Series—or in stock car racing. I think him holding me to a high level has been good and that accountability has been really good for me to keep wanting to work to get better.”
If the cadence of Daniels’ delivery over the radio on race days sounds eerily similar to that of Chad Knaus, don’t be surprised. After graduating from UNC-Charlotte in 2010 with a degree in mechanical engineering and a minor in mathematics, Daniels was recruited by Hendrick Motorsports four years later. He worked under the tutelage of the seven-time Cup crew chief as the No. 48 team’s race engineer.
Over the next four seasons, Jimmie Johnson won 13 races and the 2016 Cup title—the seventh of the soon-to-be Hall of Famer’s career. In 2019, Daniels moved to the competition department—but midway through the season he was pulled back to the track as crew chief for Johnson and the No. 48 crew.
When Larson joined the fold in 2021, Daniels received the call to work with arguably the most talented driver of his generation. Although Larson was apprehensive at the time, he and Daniels have clicked.
“At the time, he probably didn’t think I had a ton of experience,” Daniels said at Darlington Raceway last Sunday following their 15th win together. “By the time he and I were paired together, I think I had been a crew chief for a year or two and he had been in the sport for seven or eight years.
“He probably thought it was an unlikely pairing, which is totally fair to say, and we had to build our relationship and build our trust. Trust is obviously the foundation for any relationship.”
Compared with the seven seasons that Larson spent with Chip Ganassi Racing, Hendrick Motorsports’ sole interest is stock car racing. The organization has the resources and the data to field perennial title contenders.
Larson simply had to buy in—trust Daniels and acclimate to the systems.
“Cliff and the engineers are really good at looking at driver data and coaching me through on what I can do to be better or the things that I am doing good at to keep after,” Larson said. “You just naturally evolve. With all that data, the learning curve happens so much easier. Everybody is getting better every week because of the data.”
Larson has faced a number of challenges in the regular season from Daniels’ four-race suspension stemming from the modification of hood louvers at Phoenix Raceway in the spring to five uncharacteristic DNFs due to crashes. Considering that five of the six wrecks occurred at Daytona, Talladega, or Atlanta, the stat doesn’t surprise Larson.
“Not really when there are so many superspeedways in the regular season,” Larson quipped with a laugh.
Despite posting the most DNFs in a season since 2019 (eight), Larson has accumulated the second most points after 27 races—just one behind his teammate William Byron.
“Our relationship has grown a lot over the last handful of years, as it should,” Daniels said. “The way our year has gone, it’s been easy to get discouraged at times, and I’ve tried to be there to help—kind of twofold, keep him accountable when we need to, and be his biggest supporter and biggest cheerleader because we all know he has the talent.
“When he gets out front and he executes a good restart and does all the things that we know he can do, he’s dynamite.”
On Saturday at Kansas Speedway, Larson qualified second for the Hollywood Casino 400—0.075-sec. of the pace of pole winner Christopher Bell’s lap of 29.954-sec. (180.276 mph).
Larson used the regular season to push his car to the limit. Sometimes, he paid the price for crossing that line. The 31-year-old racer believes the key to advancing in the Playoffs is to not take himself out of contention.
“We had an up-and-down regular season,” Larson said. “How are we still up here? Well, it’s because a lot of other people had the same sort of regular season. The Playoffs are a kind of a reset and it was good to get off to a good start last weekend.”
Of the nine race tracks remaining on the schedule, Larson has victories at eight—and despite his superspeedway record—he’s not counting out his chances at Talladega.
“All the tracks in the Playoffs—aside from Talladega, and heck, we could go to Talladega and win,” Larson said. “Anybody can. I feel like we’ve gotten way better at the superspeedways, just on paper it doesn’t show it.
“Honestly, I like how the schedule shapes up over the final (races). That doesn’t mean it will be easy at all. I just hope we have the speed that we had at a lot of these tracks earlier in the year and we can be on offense.”
With his coveted Southern 500 victory, Larson is the only driver locked into the Round of 12. Unfortunately, the team didn’t survive the second round during the first year with the new car. This season, Larson has matched his win total (three) from 2022 and has led more laps with nine races remaining.
The Darlington win not only allows Larson to breathe easier this weekend at Kansas and next at Bristol Motor Speedway but now Daniels can concentrate on the No. 5 team’s cars for the next round and beyond.
“There’s nobody else that I would trust more than him behind the wheel of our car,” Daniels said. “He’s learned to trust me and the way that our team operates, the way we communicate and work together.
“That’s definitely a special relationship that we have and really that our whole team has.”
Given the level of communication that has developed between the driver and crew chief in three short years, the potential of the No. 5 team is limitless. While their relationship might not have seemed ideal at the start, after one successful title run there’s no telling what Larson and Daniel can accomplish together.
“Yeah, I love him,” Larson said. “I love him as a crew chief and I hope we get to work together for a long time.”
Follow Lee Spencer on Twitter @CandiceSpencer or email her at: [email protected].
