SPEEDWAY, Ind. — Indianapolis Motor Speedway demands a combination of speed, strategy and precise execution to be successful.
That process begins with the men atop the pit box calling the shots for the 38 competitors in Sunday’s Brickyard 400 (2 p.m. ET, TNT Sports, truTV, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
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Crew chief Cliff Daniels guided the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports team and driver Kyle Larson to victory in the 2024 edition of the crown-jewel race, the sport’s return to the oval after a three-year hiatus. With the prestige of winning this race comes an enormous amount of work in advance. That shows up at the track.
“Before you even get to (Saturday), you’ve got to have a good week,” Daniels told NASCAR.com. “You’ve got to have a good week of prep. And we did a lot of studying. We had a good week. Worked on a handful of things with Kyle in the sim and came here and made a handful of changes that we were able to feel and able to get a read on. So a lot of that was very encouraging. Now we’ve just got to put the details together and go have a good Saturday, hopefully to lead us into a good Sunday.”
Teams were granted a full 50-minute practice session on Friday with three sets of Goodyear tires to utilize, incentivizing teams to make multiple runs and numerous adjustments to verify any necessary changes. The right-side tire used this week is different from years past, but Daniels noted enough familiarity with this compound’s behavior meant no drastic observations from Friday’s session.
To nail a car setup here means maximizing straightaway speed, downforce and handling before factoring in fuel mileage. Legacy Motor Club’s cars have been notably fast at the iconic Indianapolis track in recent years, and that was bolstered by Friday’s sessions with John Hunter Nemechek posting the second-best lap time and Erik Jones fourth.
“This place is so fast,” said Justin Alexander, crew chief of Jones’ No. 43 Toyota. “You’re really trying to balance grip and downforce and drag, so you’re really kind of looking for that sweet spot on a (lift over drag) number. You’ve got to be trimmed out a little bit, but if you’re trimmed out too much, you won’t have enough grip. So really, it’s about building a car that captures what you’re looking for there and then having a setup to go with it.”
But with that comes fuel strategy, a constant game throughout the scheduled 160-lap distance that starts as soon as engines are fired. That has materialized in different facets in each of the last two Brickyard 400s, all depending on when cautions fell late in the going.
“It’s absolutely important, to your point, and we’ve been on either side of it the last two years, and both ’24 and ’25 presented very different cases for the way the race played out,” Daniels said. “We spent a lot of time this week actually studying both very uniquely, and not only ourselves, but what factors were influencing the calls of others. How do they strategize their race? And a lot of different ways to get to a very similar point. For guys in the top five, you had some true three-stop cars; you had some true four-stop cars. And then you had some guys that took rights and less fuel at the end. That presents a very interesting array of circumstances to study. So we’ve studied up. We’ll see how the race plays out, and hopefully we’re making the right moves at the right time.”
Jones and the No. 43 team enter squarely at the bubble to make The Chase, sitting 33 points behind Austin Cindric for the final provisional spot in the 16-driver postseason field with five races remaining. That positioning has to be factored into Alexander’s approach.
“There’s always going to be variables, cautions that come out, things that happen in a race,” Alexander said. “For us, we’re really looking to score stage points, so that throws another wrench in there on optimum race strategy.”
Another factor playing into Legacy Motor Club’s hands is Indianapolis’ similar characteristics to Pocono Raceway. Another flat, high-speed, 2.5-mile track, Pocono’s triangle emulates features of Indy’s famed rectangle, a plus after Nemechek finished fourth and Jones sixth in June.
“The tracks race very similar,” Alexander said. “From a strategy perspective, you race them very similar as well. So yeah, we’ll take what we learned at Pocono. Obviously, we ran really well there, and we’ll try to carry it over for (Sunday).”
Another factor for crew chiefs to consider is one of the trickiest pit roads on the NASCAR calendar. At just 24 feet wide, Indy’s pit road lane of travel measures as the narrowest in NASCAR with the narrowest stalls (14 feet, 4 inches), all while featuring the longest pit stalls (46 feet, 6 inches) and the longest pit road at over 2,500 feet.
“Narrow pit road here. That is certainly a big factor where you want to be as far to the Turn 1 side on pit road as you can be,” Daniels said. “That way, if the the accordion happens, you’re just ahead of it.”