NASCAR CUP SERIES: COCA-COLA 600

May 30, 2021

Cliff Daniels

Press Conference

An Interview with:

THE MODERATOR: We're now joined by Cliff Daniels, the race-winning crew chief from tonight's Coca-Cola 600.

Q. Cliff, your team swept all three stages in addition to winning the race. What's it mean to have a points day like that? Does it mean a lot right now or is it not the biggest thing in the world considering how early in the regular season it is?

CLIFF DANIELS: Yeah, that's a good question. Points are always of concern for us. The more playoff points you can carry into the playoffs is always going to be those tokens in the bank that you never know if you're going to need.

I can't say that I expected we were going to get them all the way we did today, so that was really cool that that happened, and yeah, the competition is so tight right now, thankful that the Hendrick Motorsports cars are running as good as we are. The Chevrolets are fast, but Denny is still out there with a really big points lead, and those guys have a had a strong year, so always keeping our eye out for maximizing stage points, maximizing stage finishing positions, and certainly it worked out today.

Q. Cliff, have you prioritized specific racetracks over others?

CLIFF DANIELS: Really no, because everywhere we go with Kyle right now and even for the next 10 or 15 weeks is a new race for us every week. I've never been to any of these places with Kyle before, so every week is a new week, and the foundation of the notebook that we're trying to build, thankful that the year has gone the way it has, but we still have a lot of building to do.

Sonoma is a bit of a different style road course than the ones that Hendrick Motorsports has been good at the last few years. Our last trip at Sonoma really wasn't that great, so we've dug into some old notes for Sonoma as an example. So the same prep that we put into Charlotte for this week we've got to take to Sonoma next week just because we don't have a great recent history of our cars running good there, so we've really got to make sure we show up strong.

Q. Green flag pit cycles, huge for you tonight. Huge for you all of this year. You are actually defending front-running spots on green flag stops at a considerably higher clip than you did last season. Have you noticed that? And what is driving that large of an improvement?

CLIFF DANIELS: Yeah, a couple things. Our pit crew, we went through a bit of a building process last year. One of our guys actually stepped away at the end of the year and we got a new jack man in so we had to do some work just getting our team kind of up to speed and working together, and now those guys are just lights out. They do a phenomenal job. They're a great working group together. The camaraderie is strong.

So knowing that one of our strengths is physically pitting the car, the guys do such a good job, I'm actually excited when I see a green flag pit cycle come around because I know that's one of our strengths.

And then we study a lot maximizing pit-ins, and Kyle is really good at that. He's great at deep braking zones and figuring out how to get the car whoa'd up when it's moving around and it's all over the place. It's kind of natural for him.

With that, those two pieces, and then timing is another big thing, understanding the falloff in a race, do you pit early, do you pit late within the cycle, and we've had to brush up a good bit on our own understanding of that last year to what we've taken this year. So many different factors, and it's all kind of coming together okay.

Q. What have you learned about Kyle Larson that you didn't know at the start of the season?

CLIFF DANIELS: Obviously one of the biggest things that I've learned, and this is going to sound really obvious to say, he spends so much time reading a dirt track for all of these races that he goes to. He watches every series that ends up on track, and he really studies what's going on with the racetrack.

So for us, the more I can give him information on what I anticipate for our pavement surfaces going into a weekend, whether it's PJ1, clouds versus sun, temp changes, things like that, that's something that's just very natural for him, and again, that's what he spends a lot of his time doing to make him good on the dirt tracks. So again, it may sound obvious to say, but that's probably the biggest thing.

Q. Can you give me a sense of perspective certainly with your experience with the 48 team in years past you guys often were dominant throughout the season. You guys certainly there have been some ups and downs but certainly been about as strong as anybody throughout the season. There's still a long way to go to the playoffs. The challenge in trying to remain a strong team with still three, four months or so before the playoffs even begin and still several more months before the championship race, what is the challenge and how does that compare from your experiences when you guys were the 48 and you guys kind of steamrolled everybody?

CLIFF DANIELS: Yeah, there was a few things that stood out. It's been several years, and I was fortunate, Chad Knaus, obviously the champion that he is speaks for itself, but something that I kind of learned from the experiences with the 48, I think it was 2015, we started out strong, we won I want to say like four of the first ten races or something like that, and we were really pushing exceptionally hard at the beginning of the year. It's not like we got comfortable, but burnout and exhaustion kind of come into play in the middle of the year, so it was tough to sustain that, and that kind of showed up.

So we learned from those experiences of kind of how to balance ourselves more, make sure you have the right foundation for just building your car every week to go race, and there's a process to that.

So now we've learned through the ups and downs of the last three or four years with the 48 team how to respond to adversity and not let the momentum swing really shift you too far, just kind of narrow up that window, and make sure that we have a path in place where we're balanced enough. Home life is still very important for all the guys working on our team, but we spend a lot of time at the shop and we spend a lot of time together. So making sure we have the right balance of the home time, the family time for those guys, and then when we're at work, get all 10 of the tenths that we're trying to get. Not nine, not 11, but make sure we're operating at 10 tenths, and hopefully the path that we have now and what we've built is sustainable, and I think the path that's gotten us to this point of the season has been exactly what I just described, and I don't plan on changing it anytime soon.

Q. With as strong as you guys have run the last few weeks as an organization, for as great as it's been, the last three races have not been playoff tracks, and the races with the playoff tracks it's been some ups and downs. From my perspective not being the mechanical and in your shoes, I would partially question the value of the success what it means the last three weeks because how much carries over from here, how much will carry over from Dover in particular. How do you view that, or what is important with being so dominant at the last few races when these haven't been playoff tracks, and I wonder what really is going to carry over or have the potential to carry over?

CLIFF DANIELS: Yeah, I think it's a valid question. Darlington we had a strong run at the end of the race, but we weren't as good as we needed to be for the playoffs, so that was the first of our second-place-finish runs. We took a pretty different approach from Darlington to Dover that if Darlington hadn't had have happened, we wouldn't have taken to Dover. So then we took that to Dover, ran really strong. That's going to carry over to Nashville, and I think that what we learned from Dover and hopefully what we learned from Nashville, yes, completely different racing surfaces, yes, it sounds crazy to draw some of these parallels that I'm making, I think just with the 750 package in general, we did learn and improve from Darlington to Dover and again hopefully we take that to Nashville, that I think can help us for a place like Darlington.

As one example, Kansas comes back around, we led a lot of laps at Kansas, didn't work out for us. Vegas is a playoff track. Hopefully that bodes well. We passed the whole field three times after speeding on pit road and starting in the back in Phoenix, right, and Phoenix hopefully will be a good race for us.

So I totally understand where you're coming from, and hopefully a race like Kansas or Phoenix where it didn't work out for us, we can capitalize come that time, and then I think our program needed a little bit of an upgrade in the 750 area at a bigger track, which again, we learned from Darlington and took some of that to Dover and improved. We've just got to keep it going.

Q. When you talk about the success at Darlington, I guess that gave you the freedom at Dover to do something that you might not have been more comfortable with to kind of expand the boundaries?

CLIFF DANIELS: Yes and no. We didn't really expand anything, we just kind of went about what we were doing a different way because all of our cars ran kind of middle of the top 10, back half of the top 10 during the day at Darlington, and we improved our cars by the end of the day and obviously took a big chunk out of Martin's lead, but we weren't good enough to really make a statement, if that makes sense. In Dover we made more of a statement there.

It was just kind of going about what we thought of the 750 package a different way. Like there was nothing new, there was nothing outlandish, okay, from what we think this balance should have been, we were off, so let's go about the balance a different way.

Q. When Kyle was still a teenager, people came up with the name "Young Money." The people in the dirt world were telling me you have a once-in-a-generational talent coming your way, and I don't think he ever had the opportunity to showcase what his true talent was in the Ganassi equipment. I guess my question to you is now that you have somebody -- even though he's approaching 30 but somebody you can work with and kind of mold into what you want to be, what's the next step for you and Kyle and the No. 5 team?

CLIFF DANIELS: I think really just to continue to deepen our connection, our friendship, our working relationship. Obviously with the challenges of all the COVID protocols, we've been very respectful to that and we just haven't had a ton of time to spend together. At a racetrack he kind of does his thing and we do our thing and we've had the garage separated from the motor home lot and things like that for a while.

Now that things are starting to open up, hopefully it'll give us an opportunity just to continue the path that we're on of learning each other and deepening that relationship.

So I think the sky really is the limit for him. We know how talented he is in any car that he gets in. There is some things that he tries to avoid thinking when there's a lot of second-place finishes that line up. He tries not to be too hard on himself and I've been able to kind of tap into some of that with him and help him with that. So yeah, it's been a great journey so far. Still a lot of learning and growing to do, and I'm certainly excited about it, and I think there's a lot of potential for both of us.

Q. He's a pretty Zen dude, but somebody like you that has a mechanical engineering background and he admittedly knows nothing about cars whatsoever, how do you find that balance?

CLIFF DANIELS: When I first started racing, I think it was '98 or '99, I did not know a whole lot about my race car, so there were certain things that I looked for as a driver that have kind of stuck with me before I knew much, and then thankful to my parents and my dad, taught me a lot, and I really got heavily involved in our cars, and by the time I was 16 I was setting up my own cars myself and doing a lot of the work on them myself, but it always stuck with me the things that remember paying attention to as a driver when I didn't think I knew a whole lot.

Then take that experience, yes, the mechanical engineering degree to really help add some of the principles and equations and foundation behind that, to now when Kyle and I talk and we talk about a dirt race or we talk about a Cup race, my experiences growing up and as a driver really help me to just cut some of the race car talk and cut some of the engineering talk and just kind of talk to him not necessarily driver to driver but I can speak his language a bit more and understand what he's saying a bit more than just tying a number to it or tying car talk to it, if that makes sense. So that's actually been cool for me to tap back into some old experiences when I drove, and I think it's helped us communicate more along the lines of what he's either trying to say or what he needs out of the car.

Q. What did you compete in?

CLIFF DANIELS: Anything from Bandoleros to Legends cars to NASCAR Whelan All-American Series late models. Did that for quite a few years. I think I quit racing full-time probably '08 or '09 and graduated school in '10.

Q. I was wondering if you could talk about Tyler Monn in his first 15 races with Hendrick Motorsports and how well he's fit into the mold of the 5 team.

CLIFF DANIELS: Yeah, Tyler is a young guy who actually came to us, it's going to sound weird to say, with a lot of experience, and he never had a shot on a bigger team in the Xfinity Series, Cup Series. But he's been running -- been racing many years with guys that are lower budget teams and get lapped during the race, but he has such a solid work ethic and he's really put it on himself to learn and adjust how to run at the level that we're running now, and I think his past experiences of just running on the teams that aren't up front every week really taught him a lot.

I give a lot of credit to him for what he put on his back to learn and really to operate at a very high professional level when he got on our team, and he's a great teammate, he's a great friend. He's done a really good job. He does a great job with Kyle on the radio staying calm in all situations, whether it's intense traffic with lap cars or racing for the lead. A lot of credit to Tyler. He's done a great job, and we're very thankful to have him on our team.

Q. Kyle was in here just a little earlier and he talked about the role of Chad Knaus and how he's really led team meetings and things like that, but he said he couldn't really comment on just how much of a difference that is for him and his role because he had no previous experience. You obviously have a lot of experience with Chad, working with him over the years. Can you just give a little bit about how much Chad has played a part in the uptick and performance this year now that he has a hand in all four cars?

CLIFF DANIELS: Yeah, it's been great, honestly. Chad, again, his record as a crew chief speaks for itself. Absolutely phenomenal. Now in this role he really understands how to make the rubber meet the road. Even from kind of a higher level management position, he can see if things are slipping through the cracks, he can see if there's struggles that we need help with, whether it's on the technical side, engineering side, car side, whatever it is. His influence I think is seen throughout.

He and Jeff Andrews make such a good combination together because Jeff is so good at seeing everything and really helping connect all of the different departments within our company, and again, Chad is so good at pushing everyone on the car side and the engineering side to make sure we are making the best product to the racetrack, and very thankful to have that leadership from him.

THE MODERATOR: Cliff, thanks for joining us this evening. Congratulations on the win and we'll see you next week in Sonoma.