HOMESTEAD, Fla. — Crew chief Cliff Daniels has a game plan for everything in Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series championship race at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Daniels is on the precipice of leading Kyle Larson and the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports to their third Cup championship in six seasons, entering the season finale with a 67-point advantage over second-place Christopher Bell on Sunday (3 p.m. ET, NBC, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
MORE: Homestead-Miami schedule | Starting lineup
In total, Daniels knows the No. 5 team simply needs to score at least nine points in Sunday’s race to clinch the championship, even if Bell or Denny Hamlin (minus-70) score perfect 76-point efforts. That means eight stage points would also lock up Larson’s championship effort. And by the No. 5 team’s standard, stage points are simply part of the natural game plan for Sunday’s race, in which Larson will start fourth.
That means Larson just needs to avoid disaster. And if trouble rears its head, Daniels has made sure his team is ready for all worst-case scenarios.
“At the end of the day, what we did a lot of homework on was parts, pieces, car systems, things like that,” Daniels told NASCAR.com Saturday morning. “If we were to have a failure, if we were going to have any sort of a problem, knowing what plays we need — if you have a battery failure or an alternator failure, whatever that we would need to do on pit road. [We] took that to the nth degree just to have everybody on the team up to speed and educated.
“It was even good for me just to get a reminder on how efficiently we can try to run some of these plays if you did have some sort of mechanical issue. We didn’t lose focus from the main goal of putting a fast car on the race track, but we’ve actually been preparing for this race for quite a few weeks and all this has just been part of the build-up and the prep to get here.”
The title race is now upon us, with a 50-minute practice session that began the Cup Series’ on-track festivities Friday night. Homestead is historically one of Larson’s best tracks, with two wins and six top fives to his credit in 12 starts — including a victory the last time NASCAR raced in South Florida back in March 2025.
Part of Larson’s success comes from racing inches off the wall. That bit him a couple times in what Daniels termed a “bumpy” Friday practice session, brushing the bright-blue SAFER barriers multiple times and necessitating repairs after the session.
“It was a little bumpy at times, but it wasn’t terrible,” Daniels said. “You know, we talked a lot this week about just the level of aggression to go, and we had an agreement that we didn’t want to come in and just be really soft in practice and not push the car and find the limits and do the things that we need to do to make it drive good. Because as good as Kyle is here, I think we’re better off to make sure we push those buttons to try to make sure he is comfortable and we get what he needs in the car.
“We had one or two runs that he wasn’t very comfortable [Friday], and we know why and went to work on some of that. We had a run that was actually pretty decent, and so from what I see, I think [Ryan] Blaney is really good. I think [Tyler] Reddick is really good. A couple other guys are strong, but I think we’re in the mix too, and made some good overnight changes. So just wanted to have him push. I’m glad he did. A little bit of repairs, but we’re in OK shape.”
Adam Stevens, crew chief of Bell’s No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing team, surmised after Martinsville that they will “need lightning to strike two ways” in order to win the championship this weekend. The process of bottling their own electricity began with an unsteady practice session in which they “never got it where it needed to be,” Stevens told NASCAR.com, but that also having extended garage hours both Friday night and Saturday morning aided their efforts.
“We had 2 hours and 40 minutes last night to change whatever we wanted since we were going back through tech today,” Stevens said. “And that’s the biggest thing is you’re not married to any of your setup decisions. So you know if we had some assumptions that weren’t quite correct, or you know some dynamics of the car that weren’t behaving as we expected, we have the ability to to correct that. So that’s a welcome change, especially since it’s been so long between events.”
An additional factor will be the high tire wear associated with Homestead’s abrasive, worn-out asphalt. The track has further aged in the 19 months since NASCAR last competed at Homestead, and Goodyear Racing has supplied teams with nine new sets of tires for Sunday’s race — but that equates to one less set than teams had in March 2025.
“They took a race set away, so you have to get over 30 laps per set,” Stevens said. “You have to. That’s all you have. And there’s been no talk of adding a set. So if we have a lot of cautions, there’s going to be comers and goers and you might get into a spot where you can’t put tires on when you would obviously want tires. You run eight or nine laps and you definitely want tires, but you can’t bury yourself for later in the race. But it’s really going to reward the car that predicts how the cautions are going to fall because you could drive straight to the front from dead last with 10 laps’ difference on tires. But if you get a caution 10 laps after that, they’re just going to do the same thing to you. So it’s going to be one of those type of days, and the caution is going to dictate the track position a lot.”
All that remains is the race, which leaves the job of executing a race win or championship triumph in the hands of the drivers and crew chiefs. For Daniels, this is a moment to prove the process correct.
“I think what’s important for us is just seeing through the preparation we put into it,” Daniels said. “It’s been weeks in the making, even since they announced Homestead on the calendar [as the finale] over a year ago now. We had this circled. We were hopeful that we could be in a spot in The Chase to be able to come here and compete for it. And so we’ve been building our way here for a long time. We didn’t just start preparing for this race this week. It’s been a lot in the making, and very proud of the effort for the 5 team and everybody at Hendrick Motorsports when on paper we didn’t have the speed of the Toyotas this year, and to put ourselves in a spot here, and be able to go execute.”