Kyle Larson had no idea over the final stage of a very convoluted race at Sonoma Raceway what Cliff Daniels had strategically implemented.
Daniels split the final stage in half, calling Larson in for tires and fuel from the lead, coming back out on the track in eighth and ahead of Ross Chastain. On a day where track position was key, Larson didn’t immediately understand how he was going to make up 10 seconds and complete eight passes over 30 laps.
“I was asking, ‘am I racing these guys or what,’ and they’re like, ‘yeah, you’re racing all of them’ and I thought, ‘oh, my God, I’m like 10th …’
“I thought I was going to be faster for 8-10 laps, but I didn’t know of the tires would equal out at some point because there were like twentysomething laps left. They definitely got closer to equaling out, but I still just had enough once I got to third and slowly was gaining on them, and timed it out right to when Martin got racing with him that I was kind of right there to capitalize.”
Daniels and spotter Tyler Monn repeated some version of a refrain ‘just be you,’ as Larson began his methodical march through the top-10.
Prior to that, Daniels was on two parallel tracks in that maybe the final stage would be like the first and a half, with so many crashes that they wouldn’t have to pit. They entered the final stage 10 laps short of making it to the end.
So, when it became clear that the final 51 laps were likely to stay green, Daniels liked his chances with Larson on the offense rather than defense. He just wanted Larson to be Kyle Larson.
“At that point you were pushing your fuel windows far enough so that under green in Stage 3, you weren’t going to have to take two cans of fuel, which we still didn’t have to do, so we knew we could have the advantage of a faster stop time running deeper into Stage 3 and having fresher tires, to your point about giving Kyle fresher tires,” Daniels said. “It was going to put us more in an offensive situation than a defensive situation.
“At the time you didn’t quite know who was going to pit when and how all that would play out, but obviously once we kind of made our bed, you really had to stay down that path.”
All the meanwhile, Larson conceded that he had no idea what Daniels was cooking.
Larson is not the strategist, and he will be the first one to tell you he is not mechanically inclined either, but that’s what Jeff Gordon loves about having Larson on his team at Hendrick Motorsports. He drives the car.
“He drives the wheels off it,” Gordon said. “If you’re making lap time, making good decisions … those are what the great drivers do and do well, and he’s one of the greats.
“You don’t have to know anything about a car to extract speed out of it. I do think he’s a little too humble in in some of the things he says because a key element of what works is that he is able to give good information to Cliff and the team to get more out of it.”
Larson isn’t paid to come up with the strategy or to engineer the car, but Gordon says he excellently executes his end of the bargain.
“I think mostly it’s when Cliff says, ‘hey, we’ve got to make up some spots here’ or ‘hey, we need to run this kind of a pace,’ he’s able to do those things. I guess he just does the things he needs to do right. You don’t have to worry about the others.”
He just has to be Kyle Larson.
Fortunately for Larson, on a day that had so many strategic deviations throughout the entire race, Larson has Daniels, who leads a really smart team that was able to wing it on a day where the computers didn’t have a lot of definitive direction.
“With the repave, ‘do you get tire blisters’ and ‘do your tires go 15 laps, do they go 30 laps,’ and the unknowns were more on the tire side. So knowing how to strategize around that two-stop or three-stop really for the whole day.
“Do you shorten both stages and pit on the fuel number in Stage 3, or try to hit the true fuel numbers to two-stop the whole race? With tires being the factor of uncertainty, we never thought that cautions — even a yellow here or there in a Next-Gen road course, okay, but not so many cautions.
“That was actually fun because it changed everything everybody had in their mindset for how to understand pace, falloff, all those things, that it just changed the factors that you had to solve for. People could do things differently. We were completely off script with the way that we called the race, but that was fun.”
In that regard, while Larson was told ‘just be you’ he could have said the same thing to his crew chief too.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.