HOMESTEAD, Fla. — It's easy to look at Kyle Larson's record-setting 2021 season and call it a defining moment in his journey to three NASCAR championships.
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On paper, it makes sense, considering that 2021 marked his first season with Hendrick Motorsports. Yet, Larson is quick to point to a different season in his career, one that fundamentally changed the No. 5 team and crew chief Cliff Daniels in particular.
"I think in 2021, I was new to the team, and our car was just stupid fast and maybe gave us unrealistic expectations for the following year when we went into the Next Gen body, and we had a pretty poor season," Larson said on Championship Media Day.
"I think we still made the Final Four maybe, but (Daniels) was just super intense that year, like overly intense. I think not only on me but on everybody, and I think slowly over time he recognized that's not the leader that he wanted to be.
"It wasn't like he wasn't leading in a bad way at all, it was just a totally different type of leadership than it was today. Each year he's progressed and molded into something a little bit different."
The 2021 season, the last of the Gen 6 era and Larson's first with Hendrick Motorsports, featured the No. 5 team celebrating 10 wins and setting a 36-race record with 2,581 laps led. They ended the season as champions.
RETWEET TO CONGRATULATE 2021 NASCAR CUP SERIES CHAMPION KYLE LARSON! 10 wins. What a year!@TeamHendrick | @KyleLarsonRacin pic.twitter.com/VZ1SQw3pAs
— FOX: NASCAR (@NASCARONFOX) November 7, 2021
The 2022 season, however, played out differently as the series moved into the Gen 7 era.
Larson still celebrated three wins while reaching the playoffs, but his average finish fell from 9.1 to 14.1. He failed to reach the Championship 4, and he failed to finish seven races. Engine failures led to three of these DNFs.
This is a season that challenged the No. 5 team, and especially so Daniels. As Larson tells it, his crew chief just "got mad a lot" during that 2022 season while dealing with the adversity and lack of overall success.
"I mean, he's right," Daniels bluntly said while speaking to FanBuzz on Tuesday. "I was incredibly intense about any little situation that didn't work out our way. You know, if we did have a mistake or a misstep as a team, I would go attack that and try to make sure we had everything in place to fix it.
"When honestly, sometimes things just happen. And the proper response when things happen is to have support and encouragement, and yes, have the discipline to know how to overcome that and be better moving forward.
"But I was just too caught up in just the expectation of what we had laid forward in the 2021 season."
Of course, this was a younger Daniels, a man who had only been a full-time crew chief since midway through the 2019 season.
He had gone from working with a soon-to-be-retiring Jimmie Johnson to Larson, a driver looking to prove himself after a personal mistake led to him serving a NASCAR-mandated suspension in 2020 and losing his job at Chip Ganassi Racing.
Daniels didn't have the trophies in the case, so he also wanted to prove himself at NASCAR's winningest organization in 2021. His desire and Larson's desire laid the foundation for that record-setting season.
Unfortunately for Daniels, it also created an unrealistic expectation for greatness moving forward. He realizes now that he made a mistake in believing that the team would just continue this success into 2022 with the new car.
He did not anticipate the challenges that the No. 5 team would face, which caused him to react differently than how he would prefer when things went poorly at the track.
Larson said that he saw 2022 become a truly eye-opening season for Daniels, a point on which the now-veteran crew chief agrees.
"I just realized that I was kind of turning people off to being bought into what we stood for as a team," Daniels continued. "The way to prepare, the depth, and even the camaraderie because people probably couldn't trust me at the time. 'Hey, if I make a mistake, can I trust that Cliff isn't going to get mad or upset?'
"And if you start to erode that trust, then you've really lost the cornerstone of what makes the team special. And so I was guilty of that, I knew it, and I owned it.
"It took me a little while to kind of get my arms around what was leading me to that point, and it was just the burning passion to go kind of do it again, like we had done in 2021. And it was just short-sighted for the reality of a new car and just a new page."
Daniels doesn't know the exact turning point in 2022, but he remembers how he recognized that he had fallen short as a leader.
He was able to retrace the steps that led to certain mistakes and realize that they didn't happen because someone in the shop simply screwed up. A root cause existed, one that he could address by being better in the planning and debriefing sessions each week.
With this knowledge in hand, he set out to fix the problem before it permanently fractured the No. 5 team. Daniels leaned even further into his faith, something that has long been a cornerstone in his life. He focused on forcing himself to have better perspective in times of adversity.
Daniels changed from primarily thinking about vehicle performance metrics to considering how he could better develop the people on his team.
Why tell someone to go fix a problem when you can give them grace and help motivate them to get better in multiple aspects of life? How could he instill this confidence in the employees at Hendrick Motorsports so that they would feel truly ready to meet challenges head-on?
"I kind of reinvented my approach of leaning into my faith and understanding how God brings you through the tough times and the bad times," Daniels explained. "And then you know what it means to accept good times and the blessings that come with that.
"And a lot of times, good things in your life aren't always what you create. A lot of it is what situations and blessings God gives you. And then really try to focus on how to build the people up the right way instead of just demanding an expectation for performance or for an outcome or anything like that."
This process did not happen overnight; it took considerable time in 2022, and Daniels continues to work on himself to this day.
He just appreciates that the people at Hendrick Motorsports — and especially those on the No. 5 team — have given him grace as he has made changes in his life.
They have helped him reach the point where an issue can arise early, and then the team can calmly respond to make the most out of the day.
The Southern 500. Great team effort pic.twitter.com/9RkxZvX3Je
— Cliff Daniels (@DanielsCliff) September 4, 2023
A major part of the process, which Daniels first detailed last year, is reading books as a group. He had started to read faith-based leadership books in 2021 and then even more in 2022 as he tried to make changes in his personal life.
Yet, he kept that routine to himself until the 2025 season. This is the year that he felt called to share this part of his life with his team and create a de facto book club. It paid off immensely, especially as the team tried to move forward after the sudden passing of longtime public relations titan Jon Edwards.
"I became a lot more open and a lot more comfortable to being able to share it with the team," Daniels said. "And then God kind of led me to doing that with them, really, at the start of last year. Some of that coincided very much with the loss of Jon Edwards and just a lot of events around that.
"And that kind of called me just to a higher place of really wanting to pour into people. And don't take anything for granted. Life is short. Appreciate what we have, but part of appreciating what we have is the principles and values of how we do it. To go not just do our jobs, but to be great at doing our jobs. To be great men at home, great men in the workplace, great teammates to each other."
The results of the work behind the scenes are certainly easy to see, even if Daniels did not publicly talk about his personal leadership journey.
Larson won three more races in 2023 and finished second in the championship standings. He led the series with six wins in 2024. He then won three more races and the championship in 2025.
CHAMPION. AGAIN. pic.twitter.com/IemPjxsDQA
— Hendrick Motorsports (@TeamHendrick) November 8, 2026
This season, Larson and the No. 5 team went winless during the regular season but still made the Chase. Once they headed to Darlington, they kicked off a dominant run in which they celebrated three wins, posted an average finish of 7.3, and clinched the championship in the opening stage at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
The team also faced adversity early at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, the first race of the Chase in which other championship contenders saw an opportunity to strike.
An ill-handling race car in the opening stage led to Larson falling one lap down after a very long pit stop. It appeared that he would be out of contention at a track where he had previously celebrated three wins, but he received a bit of a lifeline in the form of a caution on Lap 45.
He had the opportunity to take the wave around and start to gain some ground at the intermediate track. Though this process certainly took time as he didn't make it up to 10th place until the end of stage 2.
A strong green flag pit stop in the final stage helped Larson move to third ahead of the final run to the checkered flag. He then moved to second place and caught leader Chase Briscoe in the closing laps.
And while Larson didn't capture the win, he left Las Vegas Motor Speedway with a runner-up finish and an average finish of 2.2 through five Chase races.
The No. 5 team also showed how much has changed over the years as it encountered adversity and calmly went about business.
Instead of falling apart in the heat of the moment, the team rallied while a significantly changed Daniels led the way.
"I remember seeing him get mad a lot (in 2022)," Larson said about Daniels. "He would get mad. I don't see him getting mad really anymore.
"I think he learned through those '22 and '23 (seasons) of like a different approach to keep people motivated and keep people working down the right path."
