NASCAR CUP SERIES: ENJOY ILLINOIS 300

September 13, 2026

Cliff Daniels

Press Conference

An Interview with:

THE MODERATOR: We are joined by Cliff Daniels, crew chief of the No. 5 Chevrolet.

We'll start with questions.

Q. How much of the four-tire strategy was intentional and how much was really good fortune the way it played out? Seemed like you got crossed up a little bit.

CLIFF DANIELS: I don't know that we got crossed up. The intentional part was being able to get disparity over those guys. In a straight-up race, I think the 22 and the 6 probably had us. Of course, the one stay-out call that looks sketchy, only two cars that stayed out, us and the 21, at that point if we match them tire for tire, pit for pit, I don't know that we have enough grip to get by them, to be honest.

What all of that circumstance provided to us was mixing it up. Of course, we pit 12 laps later, four tires. Kyle knew what that felt like. He saw out the windshield a lot of guys on two or a lot of guys that had stayed out. Just what the grip level difference was there.

So then later, when the next caution sequence came out where people were going to debate pitting, I think a lot of guys were thinking it was going to be logical for us to take rights, which is where my head was. He knew what he felt because of the way we mixed it up on people at that point.

To Kyle's credit, he made the call. He knew what he wanted. He wanted four. We did that. By the time we got the track position to get back to the 22 and the 6, we had the tire advantage.

Q. A lot of brake failures. What sort of things do you control? Do you feel like the sport is in a decent enough place for what we do there or change?

CLIFF DANIELS: A lot to unpack with the brake conversation.

I would say typically for us, we have learned a package that has a good brake balance grip and feel. It is a very common package. There's nothing special. There's nothing tricky. We run that at every one of these type tracks from Loudon to Phoenix to Gateway. We have a very let's just say standard 5 car package that we have at all those tracks.

I wonder as we get towards more practice, having two sets of tires, which in my view is really good for the sport, good for the fans, that is also a lot more duty cycle on the brakes.

Part of the conversation might be to consider in the future after we have these longer practice sessions at the Nashvilles, Loudons, Gateways, Phoenix, tracks that are notorious heavy brake-demand tracks, do we allow the teams to put like-for-like changes, brake rotors and pads, on the cars going into the race.

I'm sure that would be a topic that could be kicked around. That is one thing that could potentially help in a situation like this, where you get a lot of brake pad wear and a lot of heat cycle on the brake rotors. Both of those things kind of contributing factors to the failure. Certainly that would be something to look at.

Q. To clarify, you're saying the longer practice session could potentially have contributed to some of the brake failures we saw today?

CLIFF DANIELS: Yeah, just from the perspective of lap count, which is that much more brake pad wear and overall cycles. When you have the extended practice with two sets of tires, which we all want, we all love, are grateful to have it the way we have it now, when you come in to put on your second set of sticker tires, you're going to be sitting for a minute.

That's another rapid cooling cycle from where you go from being really hot on track. You come in, sitting, making your change, putting on sticker tires to go back out. This is a bit different than what a pit stop scenario would be during a race.

You have the thermal cycle aspect because you have the pad wear aspect. Both of those things, in my mind, play a factor in just the overall threshold that you have going into a day like today.

Q. If somebody said Kyle Larson snaps his winless streak at some point in the Chase, name what track, I would have put this towards the bottom. How did you make enough gains? Beat Joey Logano straight up. Obviously made a lot of progress over the last couple years. How were you able to gain on that?

CLIFF DANIELS: Yeah, certainly it's been one little step at a time. When you look at it week by week or race by race of this track type, it's hard to see the gain.

We know it. We feel it. We tested here I think it was June a year ago, had a very productive test that provided a lot of fruit. We came back here a year ago after the test and had a really fast, really competitive car. We got damage on a restart. Had to pit a couple times. That kicked our track position away from us a year ago.

We were optimistic we could build on the core foundation of what that was. You have to respond and adapt to the rules package change with the lower downforce, higher horsepower. Some concern there.

Even when we look at our Richmond, Loudon, Iowa sequence that we just had -- I didn't say them in the right order -- we knew that they were some pretty solid days for us. We tried really hard to kind of stay on the reservation and on the pathway of building forward, don't blow the setup apart every week. Hey, look, we ran fifth at Loudon. Certainly we were down on grip, our balance was this or that, don't throw the whole thing away. Keep taking incremental gains.

That's the path to what we had today. To be clear, I still think the 22 was probably the best car today. In clean air we were good. 22 seemed more nimble and versatile at times. Kyle did a good job at restarts. Once we got back to the 22, even with the small but real tire advantage to him, that was enough.

Q. You talked the last two weeks of making pit decisions based off of we're going to get caught behind car X, Y, Z, difficult to pass. Is that as much common-sense decision-making, simple decision-making, or if it's part of a evolution in how you continue to grow and progress as a crew chief in the sense of we don't have X, I've got to do this that's a little bit different? If so, where is that line in going too far?

CLIFF DANIELS: Yeah, I appreciate the question. I think it's worth a good look at that because when we have been in positions, early Next Gen, even early first couple seasons together, which was old car plus Next Gen, we could typically just default to offense, whatever that was. Whatever the call is, play offense. That kind of is what it is.

You bring up a good point. Now that we've been on this let's just say string of not winning and having kind of a tough hole to dig out of from speed and performance, it does force you to think differently, not only with your setups and your approach, but strategy.

Then, just with some of those situations, not having the speed and performance, you don't get as good a pit pick, you didn't qualify as well, things don't go your way, so now you're in those situations, environment, where kind of by force of nature you have to learn to adapt and learn to maximize what that is. That's where you and I have had this conversation a lot.

I'm still grateful for the struggle, for the challenge, because it has forced us to think differently that we've built out our notebook in ways that are more than just playing offense only.

We still have a lot more factors that we can look at going into a race. There's still a certain play call for playing offense that's fine, but we've had to learn how to do things differently, stick to it, make it work.

Been a lot of work behind the scenes with our engineering staff, even Kyle, Tyler, myself, talking through situations. If we're ahead on tires, but we don't have track position, if we're behind on tires, do have track position, if we're coming from the back, if we are coming back into a long green flag run at Darlington, don't have track position, how do you make up ground there. All those conversations are a very healthy page for us to be on.

To answer your question directly, I would say it's an evolution of where we are in our life, in our journey together that I think we're going to be able to build on.

To your question of can you take it too far. I don't know what that would look like yet completely. There's some times that being too different unnecessarily can maybe get in the way.

Specifically for the call today, I was very intentional of wanting to be different because I just didn't think we had enough to go tire for tire past the 22 and take the lead. It wasn't the cleanest way of being different, because we had to line up 21st, 22nd on a restart. It proved another layer to our decision-making down the road in the race today of how to be different and how to get the tire advantage and make good on it.

Q. Is it easier to do because this is the second race of the Chase? Points, points, points are so important. You're making a call that you feel like you got to be different, but you're also putting yourself potentially at some point in a little bit of a hole where points matter, could bite you. How does that factor in because it's earlier in the Chase that if it doesn't work out, potentially, there's still more time to make it up, or is that the wrong way to look at it?

CLIFF DANIELS: I would say that it had less to do. That sequence of calls today had less to do with the timing of the Chase, and it had more to do with the fact that we had bagged stage points well in both stages.

Your risk calculation at that point can favor a little more to the risk side, which it was, to try to create some element of disparity that we could then use later.

The whole time I was thinking it, I'm like, man, this is going to look really tough if we're one of just a few cars to stay out. But generate disparity so we can play offense somewhere down the road.

I knew Kyle was sizing up the 22, whether it was in his mirror or windshield, that he would know what those moves would be given the right opportunity and enough grip to do it.

Q. When Jeff was in here, he said in the last couple months you guys are trying to find some new things, catch up. Obviously trailing JGR and now that Penske has leapfrogged a little bit, are you now at a position that you feel like you want to try and try some things, take some risks? If so, how far down the line do you take those risks? Do you do it now, closer towards the end?

CLIFF DANIELS: I think to answer your question correctly, I would go back to the beginning of this season where we didn't quite know our deficit to the Toyotas at that time, didn't quite know our deficit to the field.

Early in the year we were taking I would say too many risks, too many different approaches that weren't necessarily what we should have done at the time. I think of like Phoenix, we got on a different stage than what we needed to be. Darlington early in the year we did not do a good job of the setup we put in the car, how we approached that one.

I say that because now, like in answering your question, we have learned through those mistakes that we can't just go overreach on everything, every week. Everything can't be in question every week. There's some things that have to be your solid foundation point. You've got to be more calculated of the things that you're going to build in that are different. You have to be as equally as calculated of the things you're going to build in that aren't different, how to stay true from that baseline point which to build.

That's been a 5 team thing, but it's also been kind of a Hendrick thing here recently. We've had to really push ourselves and learn to find that balance of we need to bring a few new things to the racetrack this weekend, we're getting beat, out paced, we still have to put in the work to find those things, but the core is in a general vicinity of a couple points on the setup sheet, stay there, just be more calculated with some of the things that we change.

Through the lens that we have now, this isn't a round-style playoff, I know you know that, but it's not like we just won and are advancing to the next round. You still have to be calculated every week to take points in mind and to put yourself solidly down the stretch where we can't go walk into the next three or four weeks and just get completely off script.

We're going to build on the same process that we now have in the way that I just described it. That's going to be our path forward for the next eight weeks.

THE MODERATOR: Cliff, congratulations on the win today. Good luck next week.

CLIFF DANIELS: Thank you.