Meet Cliff Daniels, the crew chief behind Kyle Larson's phenomenal season
By Bob Pockrass
FOX Sports NASCAR Writer
When Kyle Larson joined Hendrick Motorsports last year, he didn’t know who would crew chief the car he would drive. When he learned he would have Cliff Daniels, he didn’t have any second thoughts.
Don’t take that to mean that Larson had total confidence in the ability of Daniels, who spent 50 races as crew chief for Jimmie Johnson, with no wins, five top-5s and an average finish of 18.2 as the seven-time Cup champion closed his career.
Larson just didn’t seem overly concerned about who would crew chief his car.
"I didn’t really know Cliff, so it was hard for me to have an opinion on somebody I didn’t know," said Larson, who joined Hendrick Motorsports after a nine-month suspension for use of a racial slur in what he thought was a private chat during an online race.
"I was open-minded to whoever. I was just thankful to be back in a Cup car."
And Daniels was thankful for the chance to crew chief anyone at Hendrick. He wasn’t sure he would get that opportunity.
"It’s a results-driven business," Daniels said. "I remember telling my wife at the end of the year, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to have a job.' ... If you just average our finishing position, regardless of fast car or not, it was not a good year. And if our company has decisions to make moving forward, I get it. I can’t dispute that.
"Even though I wanted to be like, 'Our team is strong. We’ve had good runs, but something has happened — a cut tire, this or that, whatever,’ I still always had that in the back of my mind."
It's a good thing for Daniels and Larson that those doubts didn’t seem to fill the minds of the Hendrick brass. Larson was paired with the Daniels team, and they have won nine races together and enter the championship race Sunday at Phoenix Raceway with more than twice the wins of any other driver this season.
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They have won more races than they thought they would, thanks in part to a bond formed prior to the Daytona 500 in February. Daniels went to several of Larson’s sprint-car races. He’d hang out at those events and watch and talk to Larson’s crew chiefs to learn about his new driver.
"It taught me so much about how much he can see inside the race car. It is unbelievable," Daniels said. "He can get out after a dirt race — pick which series, it doesn’t matter — any dirt race, and he can tell me how the rest of the field was. ... It didn’t happen once. It happened many times."
At the same time, Larson learned a lot about his new crew chief.
"I learned he’s a much bigger dirt fan than I originally thought," Larson said of Daniels. "He’s probably a bigger dirt fan than I am.
"He watches way more racing than I do. That’s neat that he tries to figure that out and see what makes those drivers [strong], what kind of tendencies they have [that are] in myself as well."
When Larson would ask more questions about points and racing scenarios during a debrief of a Cup race, it made sense to Daniels. Larson was trying to understand other driver situations just like he could at a short track, where a driver has more ability to move his head and see things, including a video screen or scoreboard while racing at smaller tracks.
"He has a mind capable of processing all of that in the moment and still driving a car stupid fast," Daniels said. "I had to make sure I’m sharp in my game during the race, with the information I give him, just to tell him what’s going on.
"He truly feels like if he doesn’t know what’s going on, then he can’t see the big picture of the moves he needs to make and how and when to make them."
Daniels would methodically break down situations for Johnson as well, but he started doing so even more and in greater detail for Larson, who has always focused on driving and not sweating the details of a car setup. Larson’s strength is his ability to drive a race car and explain what it is doing without having such deep mechanical expertise to try to suggest changes to an engineer such as Daniels.
While Daniels typically doesn't tell Larson how to drive, he does give input, depending on what he sees from atop the pit box. He gave suggestions last week at Martinsville, a place where Larson struggles.
"[It was] I need you to abuse the rear tires less and do this different, this different and this different," said NBC analyst Steve Letarte, who worked with Daniels at Hendrick. "He’s talking to a driver that has won nine times this year, yet he’s telling him how he wants him to drive differently.
"I think the comfort they have to have that conversation is just one more example of why they’re so successful."
But even while the two have thrived, there is part of Daniels that wonders how they have won nine races together with pretty much the same team that didn’t win last year with Johnson. The Hendrick cars have more speed this year, which certainly helps, but Daniels also credits Johnson with how the team approaches race weekends.
"There is so much about this team, who we are, how we operate, how organized we are that hasn’t changed that much," Daniels said. "And I credit a lot of that, honestly, to Jimmie. He was always one that knew better than anyone how to be consistent week in and week out, how to build the system, the process, the routine to operate at that level every week.
"That is what he always coached me to do, that is what he always coached the team to do, and that’s what we did."
Team owner Rick Hendrick saw the potential in Daniels when he worked as an engineer for Johnson under crew chief Chad Knaus (now Hendrick’s competition director).
"He's a super sharp guy," Hendrick said. "If you look at the way they ran toward the end of the year, we were just getting our program better and starting to click. You could just watch him as he ran the team and made the team better, that he was going to be in a good spot this year.
"Did I think he could win this many races? Nobody ever expects to win that many races in a year."
Team general manager Jeff Andrews said it took a while for Daniels to form the unit to his liking and indicated that the group was not as strong a year ago.
"In fairness to Jimmie, I'm not sure we had everything put together there at that particular time," Andrews said. "It takes a little bit of time to make all those things work.
"Obviously, Cliff had the advantage of being with his group of guys and being with Jimmie and kind of getting that race team formed, getting it going to his standards."
Larson knows Daniels only from this year, which has gone even better than the highest initial expectation.
"After being with him more throughout the offseason, well before we ran a race together, I knew he was going to be really good," Larson said. "Obviously, we have done better than we both thought we would this year.
"He’s just a very focused person and really, really good at what he does."
Bob Pockrass has spent decades covering motorsports, including the past 30 Daytona 500s. He joined FOX Sports in 2019 following stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @bobpockrass.
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