Cliff Daniels’ path to becoming a winning NASCAR Cup Series crew chief has been quite the journey, a trail that began as a promising race engineer for Jimmie Johnson and the No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports team. When Daniels took over, Johnson illustrated his new crew chief’s devotion to the team by saying that “he truly bleeds the 48.”
In a turnabout, that team is now the No. 5, and the suggestion that his circulatory system still courses with Ally purple may no longer apply. That team’s driver is now Kyle Larson, who brought the group back to Victory Lane for the first time since 2017 with his win Sunday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
“It’s been a hell of a journey for all of us,” Daniels told his crew over the team radio after Larson drove under the checkered flag. “Really proud of you guys. Great work. Long time coming.”
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Daniels’ win came in his 55th start as a big-league crew chief, but even in that relatively brief time, he’s been through a gauntlet of changes. Suddenly thrust into calling the shots for Johnson midstream in the 2019 season, Daniels took over with the goal of revitalizing the playoff hopes of a seven-time series champion before his ride into semi-retirement.
No pressure, right? His midseason efforts two years ago weren’t quite enough to salvage an 11th-hour postseason spot, and the unusual 2020 campaign — when Johnson missed a race because of a COVID-19 diagnosis and was disqualified from the Coca-Cola 600 for a technical violation — also came up just short at the end of the regular season.
Through it all, Daniels remained largely unflappable as he led with his radio communications, but the feelings from those two seasons lingered, even as his pairing with Larson was about to connect.
“Kyle coming onboard has just been a nice spark for this team because it was tough to see Jimmie retire,” Daniels said after Sunday’s win. “We wanted to win with him so bad, and we had some great runs last year that just never materialized for one reason or another.
“So, yeah, I mean, it was tough on our team to learn those lessons and fight those battles and to have Jimmie go retire. A lot of us had won not just one race but a lot of races or even championships with Jimmie. To end without getting a win, to see him kind of move on was so bittersweet.”
So while the backbone of the team remained intact for 2021, Daniels entered a new chapter with a new driver and a new car number this season. Any doubts about how quickly the pairing might click might be understood, especially with pre-race on-track time limited this year as COVID protocols continue. But just four races into the Cup Series season, Hendrick Motorsports has a modest two-race win streak rolling, with both victories produced by its newest driver-crew chief combinations.
William Byron and crew chief Rudy Fugle set the tone with their first win together the previous week at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Sunday, the time was primed for Larson and Daniels.
“Cliff has a really good team,” team owner Rick Hendrick said. “I didn’t really expect for it to come this quick because I just thought it would take more time to jell. But our cars are fast. He’s a champion really. I’m so lucky to have him. Cliff is just a great young man. To win in the fourth race, especially when you don’t have any practice, you just show up and race, it’s really been awesome. I think they’re going to have a lot of success together this year.”
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Credit the extra levels of preparations by both driver and crew chief, a foundation that began in the offseason and continues today, for offsetting the lack of practice and qualifying at a majority of the races so far.
“You have to be right when you unload for the race,” Daniels says. “We knew it was going to take a lot of prep work to get here. We’ve done that every week. Kyle is in the shop three days a week just poring through notes with us, looking at video, looking at data. Our guys have done a nice job to help get him prepared, and likewise he’s done a nice job of just giving us sensations he needs to feel, things he’s felt in the past and how he would like the car to respond in certain situations.”
Daniels had his own response down the stretch at Las Vegas, drawing on lessons from longtime team leader Chad Knaus, who has hung up his crew-chief headset to take the helm as vice president of competition at HMS this year.
Daniels says he learned long ago to always think ahead as the race progressed. To that end, he said he had two contingency plans in place in the event that a caution period interrupted the final stage and forced his hand with pit strategy. When the race went the final 83 laps under green-flag conditions, those alternate plans weren’t needed.
Even when Larson initially missed his pit entry ahead of his final stop, he was met with steady reassurance over the team radio. The pit-stop exchange cycled the revived No. 5 back to the lead and its 28-year-old driver did the rest.
“Kyle is so good and so confident in himself that he doesn’t need a lot of cheerleading,” Daniels says. “We’re just trying to make sure we have all the pieces around him set up the right way so he can go get the job done. He was on it today.”
